Biology Newsfeed

US Scientists Successfully 'Switch Off' Cancer Cells

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: August 26th, 2015, 8:00am UTC

iONiUM sends news that Mayo Clinic cancer researchers have developed a technique to reprogram cancer cells in a lab, essentially "turning off" their excessive cell growth. That code was unraveled by the discovery that adhesion proteins mdash; the glue that keeps cells together mdash; interact with the microprocessor, a key player in the production of molecules called microRNAs (miRNAs). The miRNAs orchestrate whole cellular programs by simultaneously regulating expression of a group of genes (abstract). The investigators found that when normal cells come in contact with each other, a specific subset of miRNAs suppresses genes that promote cell growth. However, when adhesion is disrupted in cancer cells, these miRNAs are misregulated and cells grow out of control. The investigators showed, in laboratory experiments, that restoring the normal miRNA levels in cancer cells can reverse that aberrant cell growth.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=US+Scientists+Successfully+'Switch+Off'+Cancer+Cells%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1K0Xxzc"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F08%2F26%2F0331213%2Fus-scientists-successfully-switch-off-cancer-cells%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/08/26/0331213/us-scientists-successfully-switch-off-cancer-cells?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/08/26/0331213/us-scientists-successfully-switch-off-cancer-cells?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/02SVQXs1mz8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

Read more

Return to the Newsfeed