The Hero, Formerly Known as Bee Venom 1

The Hero, Formerly Known as Bee Venom

Michael Kelly

Purdue University
The Hero, Formerly Known as Bee Venom 2

The Hero, Formerly Known as Bee Venom

Cancer. A word that evokes many feelings in people, none of which are

remotely positive. The American Cancer Society states that approximately one half

of all men and one third of all women will develop cancer in their lifetime. I can

personally attest to this due to the fact that two of the four men in my family have

already suffered from cancer, as well as my mother. But what exactly is it and why is

it so hard to cure? Cancer, in short, is a group of diseases in which cells in a part of

the body begin to grow out of control. The tumor growth begins when a cancer cell

essentially infiltrates the genetic structures of a cell and plants its roots. Once it has

done this, the cancer cells are free to multiply and there is essentially nothing the

body can do to stop it. This alone makes cancer extremely difficult to cure, but the

real problem lies in that the only FDA approved treatments, known as

chemotherapy, not only kill the cancerous tumor cells, but also kill other healthy,

rapidly reproducing, cells in the body. This is the reason why many recipients of

chemotherapy lose their hair, as hair is one of those types of cells. Chemotherapy

also has many other extremely adverse side effects. In my brother’s case, for

example, he developed extremely painful mouth and throat sores that made it
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impossible for him to swallow anything. He also experienced a condition called

neuropathy, which is damage to a nerve group that can cause loss of feeling and

other side effects. In his case he lost feeling in his feet, which made walking even

more difficult. These are just a few examples of the terrible side effects that

chemotherapy can make the body endure. Thus cancer imposes a great challenge

upon the medical researchers of the world; devise a therapy that will kill the cancer,

yet not harm the body. Researchers at the Washington University School of

Medicine in St. Louis have risen to this challenge and are today testing a new form of

cancer therapy.

In nature there exists an extremely potent toxin that holds great promise in

curing cancer and, ironically, many of us have probably received a form of it on

more than one occasion. The toxin that I am talking about is called melittin, which is

derived from the venom of a bee. Melittin is an extremely toxic peptide, or short

strain of amino acid, that attacks almost all forms of cells. Because of its toxicity, it

holds great potential as a cancer therapy. However, in its free form (without

anything keeping it from attacking healthy cells) it is too dangerous to use as the

amount of melittin in an amount less than a lethal dose is not enough to provide

significant benefits to the patient. Here arises another problem: how do you deliver

it safely, and effectively, to a patient? We essentially need a “nano-bee” to travel

through our body and “sting” the venom into the tumor cells.

Thankfully, the scientists working on this cure have overcome this obstacle

in creating a nano-vehicle carrier, or a nanoparticle as I will refer to it as from here

on out, that is able to safely navigate our bodies and deliver the melittin directly to
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the cancer cells. It truly is a “nano-bee” to sting, and hopefully kill, the cancerous

cells within our bodies. This gives the treatment insurmountable promise for many

reasons. The half-life of a particle of free melittin is extremely short, less than a

minute, which means that within ten minutes of an administered safe dose of free

melittin, about one percent of the melittin remains in the patients bloodstream. This

is a problem because most of the melittin given to the patient attacks healthy blood

cells, as they are the first cell the peptide encounters, and with every passing second

less and less melittin reaches its target, the cancer cells. However, with the

nanoparticle to harbor the melittin, it protects both the melittin from deteriorating

as well as the melittin from attacking every other cell that the particle may

encounter on its journey to the tumor. Also, when the melittin is contained within

the nanoparticle there is a ten-fold increase of melittin circulating in the blood two

hours after it was administered. This effectively solves the half-life problem they

encountered when using the free form of melittin. Of course, the scientists can’t just

theorize this and send it into hospitals for use, so they ran tests to see if it worked as

well as they hoped. The first test administered was on human breast cancer cells,

implanted in the mice. They gave the mice three different treatments, a saline

solution (as a control), one was just empty nanoparticles with no melittin (as a

placebo), and the last was the melittin-loaded nanoparticles. The melittin-loaded

nanoparticles inhibited tumor growth by roughly twenty-six percent over the other

two treatments.

With a treatment that consists of such a highly toxic peptide there obviously

are a lot of concerns for the safety of the recipient. The first, and most intriguing, is
The Hero, Formerly Known as Bee Venom 5

that many people are allergic to bee stings, primarily because of the venom that is

injected. This is a major concern because, as some of you may know, the sting can

potentially hospitalize people who have severe allergic reactions to bee stings.

According to the researchers, melittin itself is a weak allergen as compared with the

various other parts that constitute bee venom. Another concern was that some of

the melittin being carried by the nanoparticles was being released into the blood

stream. This is a major concern because the doses administered within the

nanoparticles would be above the level required for a lethal dose. The researchers

did take this into considerations and performed routine tissue histology, to check

the cells of the tissue under a powerful microscope, on the liver, kidney and heart

and found no evidence of tissue damage. Also, as mentioned earlier, researchers

were concerned with the melittin affecting, and possibly destroying, other cell

tissue, not just that of the tissue. They were able to overcome this concern with the

development of the nanoparticle carrier so the mellitin could be safely delivered to

the target site of the tumor.

With cancer having already had such a profound effect on my life, research

like this gives me hope. I believe that melittin and its “nano-bee” carriers hold

tremendous promise in the field of cancer therapy. Even if it is deemed unfit for use

on human patients it is still reassuring to know that steps are being made to find a

cure for this still dreaded disease. This research should also open the eyes of other

medical researchers to the fact that the extremely elusive cure to this deadly disease

could be in our back yard, in an extremely unsuspecting package such as a bee, and

we don’t even know it.

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Works Cited

Neelish, S., Baldwin, S., Hu, G., Marsh, J., Lanza, G., Heuser, J., Arbeit, J., Wickline, S., &

Schlesinger, P., (2009, September 1). The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Retrieved

from, http://www.jci.org/articles/view/38842