In a groundbreaking study, scientists have unearthed how to put the brakes on cancer, and allow the growth of healthy tissue. Published in Nature Cell Biology, this research is expected to spur therapies that could stall or even reverse cancer damage.
Explore some of the other strategies to fight cancer
In cancer, cells grow without any control
The normal cell cycle is a heavily controlled mechanism; cells grow up to a certain point, perform their functions and die to make way for new cells. This mechanism has multiple checkpoints so that the malfunction of any one doesn’t hamper the entire process. However, when this systematic control of cell life-and-death is lost, cells divide rapidly and uncontrollably, leading to the development of tumors. Cancerous tumors can invade other tissues by using the blood and the lymphatic system. Many scientists have been baffled by these abnormal cells and how they manage to escape the body’s own cancer-fighting sentinels. Therefore, a lot of work has been devoted to the possibility of endogenous factors reversing the growth of tumors.
Cancer can be reversed by activating connection between a cell glue and a microprocessor
Adhesion molecules have long thought to be only involved in keeping the cells glued together. But, their malfunction plays a major role in the growth of cancer. When cells grow enough to make contacts with each other using adhesion molecules, they trigger the end of the cell-growth cycle. This trigger is warped in cancers and the study focused on reigniting it using molecules called microRNAs. When they removed microRNAs from cell, they discovered that they could turn on cancer. As such, scientists predicted that loading cells with these regulatory microRNAs would have the reverse effect by turning off the cancerous process. They verified it by studying the effects of a protein called PLEKHA7 that shut off cell growth and was produced only when microRNAs were delivered to cells.
How effective is the new strategy of shutting off cancer?
The study was carried out using human cells of aggressive forms of breast and bladder cancer. While this is a promising angle, it might take studies beyond the cellular level to understand the ramifications as a whole. Often, shutting off one cancerous mechanism may not be enough to stop cancer. But novel perspectives such as this could one day lead to a working model for beating cancer.
