Posts Tagged ‘cancer research’

Lessons from a Bean Sprout

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 11-19-2014

It’s hard to believe, but there are similarities between bean sprouts and human cancer.

In bean sprouts, a collection of amino acids known as a protein complex allows them to grow longer in the darkness than in the light. In humans, a similar protein complex called CSN and its subunit CSN6 is now believed to be a cancer-causing gene that impacts activity of another gene (Myc) tied to tumor growth.

Somehow the same mechanisms that result in bigger bean sprouts, also cause cancer metastasis and tumor development.

A study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center led by Mong-Hong Lee, Ph.D., a professor of molecular and cellular oncology, has demonstrated the significance of CSN6 in regulating Myc which may very well open up a new pathway for treating and killing tumors. The study results are published in this month’s issue of Nature Communications.

“We have discovered that CSN6 is a strong oncogene that is frequently overexpressed and significantly speeds up tumor growth in many types of cancer,” said Lee. “Furthermore, CSN6 also affects the expression of Myc in tumors.”

Myc is a proto-oncogene or master cancer gene that spurs tumor growth in a variety of cancers including breast, lung, colon, brain, skin, leukemia, prostate, pancreas, stomach and bladder.

Lee said that the study findings are important because targeting Myc is a challenging task due to its unique protein structure. Even though it has been studied for decades, no effective inhibitor for Myc has been successfully developed. His team’s study found that inhibiting CSN6 quickly destabilizes Myc, greatly impairing metastasis and tumor growth.

“This has the potential to unlock a promising and completely new door to effectively eliminating tumors and suppressing cancers that overexpress Myc,” said Lee.

Thanks to MD Anderson for contributing this story.

Programming Cancer Cells to Self-Destruct

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 11-05-2014

Tumor in a Dish May Change the Face of Cancer Treatment

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 10-29-2014

One of the tragic realities of cancer is that the drugs used to treat it are highly toxic and their effectiveness varies unpredictably from patient to patient. However, a new “tumor-in-a-dish” technology is poised to change this reality by rapidly assessing how effective specific anti-cancer cocktails will be on an individual’s cancer before chemotherapy begins.

A team of biomedical engineers at Vanderbilt University headed by Assistant Professor Melissa Skala has developed the technique, which uses fluorescence imaging to monitor the response of three-dimensional chunks of tumors removed from patients and exposed to different anti-cancer drugs.

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Cancer Leaves a Common Fingerprint on DNA

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 08-26-2014

Regardless of their stage or type, cancers appear to share a telltale signature of widespread changes to the so-called epigenome, according to a team of researchers. In a study published online in Genome Medicine on Aug. 26, the investigators say they have found widespread and distinctive changes in a broad variety of cancers to chemical marks known as methyl groups attached to DNA, which help govern whether genes are turned “on” or “off,” and ultimately how the cell behaves. Such reversible chemical marks on DNA are known as epigenetic, and together they make up the epigenome.

“Regardless of the type of solid tumor, the pattern of methylation is much different on the genomes of cancerous cells than in healthy cells,” says Andrew Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of medicine, molecular biology and genetics, oncology, and biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Feinberg led the new study along with Rafael Irizarry, Ph.D., a professor of biostatics at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “These changes happen very early in tumor formation, and we think they enable tumor cells to adapt to changes in their environment and thrive by quickly turning their genes on or off,” Feinberg says.

Feinberg, along with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine oncology professor Bert Vogelstein, M.D., first identified abnormal methylation in some cancers in 1983. Since then, Feinberg’s and other research groups have found other cancer-associated changes in epigenetic marks. But only recently, says Feinberg, did researchers gain the tools needed to find out just how widespread these changes are.

For their study, the research team took DNA samples from breast, colon, lung, thyroid and pancreas tumors, and from healthy tissue, and analyzed methylation patterns on the DNA. “All of the tumors had big blocks of DNA where the methylation was randomized in cancer, leading to loss of methylation over big chunks and gain of methylation in smaller regions,” says Winston Timp, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins. “The changes arise early in cancer development, suggesting that they could conspire with genetic mutations to aid cancer development,” he says.

The overall effect, Feinberg says, appears to be that cancers can easily turn genes “on” or “off” as needed. For example, they often switch off genes that cause dangerous cells to self-destruct while switching on genes that are normally only used very early in development and that enable cancers to spread and invade healthy tissue. “They have a toolbox that their healthy neighbors lack, and that gives them a competitive advantage,” Feinberg says.

“These insights into the cancer epigenome could provide a foundation for development of early screening or preventive treatment for cancer,” Timp says, suggesting that the distinctive methylation “fingerprint” could potentially be used to tell early-stage cancers apart from other, harmless growths. Even better, he says, would be to find a way to prevent the transition to a cancerous fingerprint from happening at all.

Thanks to Johns Hopkins Medicine for contributing this story.

New Discovery in Living Cell Signaling

 :: Posted by American Biotechnologist on 07-04-2014

A breakthrough discovery into how living cells process and respond to chemical information could help advance the development of treatments for a large number of cancers and other cellular disorders that have been resistant to therapy. An international collaboration of researchers, led by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, have unlocked the secret behind the activation of the Ras family of proteins, one of the most important components of cellular signaling networks in biology and major drivers of cancers that are among the most difficult to treat.

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