"NatA appears essential for the growth of cells and their ability to divide, and we can see elevated production of this enzyme in many forms of cancer" said Ronen Marmorstein, Ph.D., senior author, Hilary Koprowski, M.D. Professor, and leader of The Wistar Institute Cancer Center’s Gene Expression and Regulation program…
Reporting this week in the journal Cell, the researchers describe the first compound that directly binds to and blocks Skp2, a protein they previously showed both turns off a cellular defense against cancer and switches on a cancer-feeding metabolic pathway. "The beauty of this study is we identified an inhibitor and showed how it functions to block Skp2. Inhibitors often are discovered without an initial understanding of how they work," said co-senior author Hui-Kuan Lin, Ph.D., associate professor of Cellular and Molecular Oncology at MD Anderson. …
The discoveries improve the chances of developing more targeted therapies in place of existing drugs, which do not always work or come with side effects. Experts estimate that 60 to 90 percent of the world’s population carry the human cytomegalovirus, or CMV, which is one of the eight herpes viruses that infect humans…
"This is a proof of concept study using human cells," said Sergei Rudchenko, Ph.D., director of flow cytometry at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York City and a senior author of the study. …
Their results are published in the journal Current Biology today. Centrioles — orchestrators of cell division When our cells divide, their genetic material — in the form of X-shaped chromosomes — is aligned in the middle of the cell and segregated to opposite poles of the cell by a spindle of long tubular fibers, so-called microtubules. The structures that organize the two poles of the spindle in animal cells are called centrosomes…
The cells long have been believed to be the only naturally occurring pluripotent cells. (Under the right conditions, pluripotent cells can become any other cell in the body.) But some people object to the fact that the embryo is destroyed during their isolation…
In a study published in the July issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found a missing piece of the pediatric cancer puzzle. Changxian Shen, PhD, senior research associate at the Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Diseases at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and Peter Houghton, PhD, director of the center, may have identified one mechanism behind the early development of some pediatric solid tumors — as well as a target for future pediatric cancer therapies…
Cancer Nanotechnology Current approaches to chemotherapy leave patients with severe side effects because anti-cancer drugs meant to destroy tumors inadvertently kill healthy cells in the body. But scientists have recently developed nanoparticles that can ferry toxic medications directly to tumors while sparing healthy tissue. Because of their small size, nanoparticles escape from leaky blood vessels that are characteristic of tumors and accumulate in the cancerous tissue. Tumor cells take up the particles which release their toxic contents once inside. …
Wnt proteins are a large family of proteins that active signaling pathways (a set of biological reactions in a cell) to control several vital steps in embryonic development. In adults, Wnt-mediated functions are frequently altered in many types of cancers and, specifically, within cell subpopulations that possess stem cell-like properties…
The findings were published July 11 in Molecular Cell. Telomeres have been compared to the plastic tips at the end of shoelaces because they prevent the ends of chromosomes from fraying and sticking to each other, which scrambles the genetic information and may promote cancer…