While this may sound like the setup to some late-night nerd sketch, researchers have taken this premise and applied it to an increasingly cumbersome problem in modern biology, namely, finding meaning in the rising oceans of genomic data. …
The findings, published July 3 in Cancer Cell, contribute to the increasing acknowledgement that the cells and tissue surrounding a tumor — the stroma — are an integral part of cancer initiation, growth, and expansion. “Our study reveals a precise mechanism that stromal cells use to encourage the tumorigenesis of epithelial cancer cells,” said Jorge Moscat, Ph.D., director of the Cell Death and Survival Networks Program at Sanford-Burnham. “We have shown that in the stroma, p62 acts as an anti-inflammatory tumor suppressor, controlling the inflammatory environment and the signals that promote cancer…
source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140508110935.htm
In most tumors, the communication between the individual cells is disturbed and the cells permanently receive growth and survival signals. For this reason, drugs are increasingly used in modern tumor therapy that targets those molecules to shut down these faulty signals. Hitherto, however, it has been difficult to predict the success of such a therapy, since the signal molecules are integrated into an extremely complex cellular network, which, moreover, reacts differently for each patient, depending on the mutations the tumor bears. The research group headed by Nils Blüthgen, Charité Institute of Pathology, has now examined how the interconnection of such a cellular network affects the effectiveness of a therapy…