Cancer cure from desert

Dubai: Camels at a research centre in Dubai are playing a vital role in developing new ways of diagnosing and treating prostate cancer.

The animals at the Central Veterinary Research Laboratory (CVRL) are being used to generate antibodies that scientists hope will be of use in the detection and treatment of the disease.

In future, similar technology could be used to combat other deadly conditions — even Aids.

The camels, which are former racing animals kept at the CVRL's headquarters in Dubai, are injected with proteins extracted from tumour cells from patients who suffer from prostate cancer.

In response to these proteins, which are called antigens, they produce specific antibodies, proteins created by the body to destroy foreign substances.

These antibodies can then be extracted from the camel and it is hoped that they could eventually be used in the creation of test kits for the detection of prostate cancer and even in the destruction of tumours.

Dr Ulrich Wernery, Scientific Director of the CVRL, said camels were “very good antibody producers'' because the antibodies they make, called nanobodies, are much smaller and more heat resistant than those generated by other animals' bodies.

Antibodies

“Because these antibodies are small — about 40 times smaller than a conventional antibody — they are much better at penetrating tissue,'' he told Gulf News.

For the diagnosis of prostate cancer, the camel antibodies would be mixed with a blood sample of the patient. If there is a reaction or agglutination after mixing, it suggests the patient does have cancer, since the antibodies from the camel would be attaching themselves to tumour cells in that patient's blood.

To treat a patient, purified antibodies could be added to an anti-cancer drug and then injected into a person with prostate cancer. The antibody with the cancer drug will migrate to the tumour cells and destroy them. “We have to inject the camel with the antigen [the foreign substance that causes antibody production] six times and when they have enough antibodies then we take blood from them,'' Dr Wernery said.

The CVRL is co-operating on the project with scientists in the Belgian capital, Brussels, who were the first to detect camel nanobodies, publishing their results in 1993.

Dr Wernery's wife Renate, a scientist at the CVRL, said: “Companies turn to us because we have the best means of creating these nanobodies. We can harvest the antibodies under the best hygienic conditions and prepare them for further work.''