A Fungus Discovered in 1970 May Hold a Clue to Treating Brain Cancer

A Fungus Discovered in 1970 May Hold a Clue to Treating Brain Cancer Scientists have finally solved a 50-year-old fungal puzzle. According to a published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, chemists at MIT have finally cracked the code on synthesising Verticillin A – a compound found in fungi that scientists have been eyeing since 1970.And early tests suggest it has potential for treating certain types of brain cancer, especially in kids.

Why Did This Take Half a Century?

Verticillin A and related fungal compounds have drawn interest for their potential anticancer and hantimicrobial activity, but their complexity has made them difficult to synthesise.

Back in 2009, the same MIT lab managed to synthesise a nearly identical compound called (+)-11,11′-dideoxyverticillin A. The difference between that molecule and verticillin A is just two oxygen atoms.

But as MIT chemistry professor Mohammad Movassaghi explains, those two tiny oxygens hmade things exponentially harder. They made the molecule “so much more fragile, so much more sensitive” that even with years of advances in chemistry techniques, it remained maddeningly out of reach.

Those oxygen atoms basically meant the researchers had to rethink their entire approach, changing the order of operations in a synthesis that already required 16 painstaking steps.

The Breakthrough

What finally worked was getting the timing exactly right. The team had to add certain chemical groups earlier in the process than they’d done with the similar compound, carefully “masking” and protecting sensitive parts of the molecule so they wouldn’t fall apart during later steps. It’s chemistry as precision engineering.

Now, after more than 50 years, they can now not only make verticillin A, but also create custom variants of it to test for different medical applications.

The Cancer Connection

This is where things get really interesting. Fungi produce verticillin A as protection against pathogens, but researchers have long suspected it might have anticancer properties. Now we’re getting proof.

When the team at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute tested derivatives of verticillin A against diffuse midline glioma, a rare and particularly nasty paediatric brain tumour, they found something promising. The compounds were especially effective against cancer cells with high levels of a protein called EZHIP, which has been identified as a potential drug target for this type of cancer.