Cancer Hijacks Natural Cell Process to Survive

저자：   업로드：2017-06-27  조회수：

    Scientists in the U.K. report that cancer tumors manipulate a natural cell process to promote their survival suggesting that controlling this mechanism could stop progress of the disease.

    Their study (“A Pan-Cancer Genome-Wide Analysis Reveals Tumour Dependencies by Induction of Nonsense-Mediated Decay”) is published in Nature Communications.

    “We discover cancer-specific NMD [nonsense mediated decay]-elicit signatures in TSGs [tumor suppressor genes] and cancer-associated genes,” write the researchers. “Our analysis reveals a previously unrecognized dependence of hypermutated tumors on hypofunction of genes that are involved in chromatin remodeling and translation.”

    NMD is a natural physiological process that provides cells with the ability to detect DNA errors called nonsense mutations. It also enables these cells to eliminate the mutated message (decay) that comes from these faulty genes, before they can be translated into proteins that can cause disease formation.

    NMD is known among the medical community for the role it plays in the development of genetic diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis and some hereditary forms of cancers. But not all nonsense mutations can elicit NMD, so until now, it’s wider impact on cancer was largely unknown.

    A team from the University of Oxford Medical Sciences Division and the University of Birmingham developed a computer algorithm to mine DNA sequences from cancer to accurately predict whether or not an NMD would eliminate genes that had nonsense mutations. The work originally focused on ovarian cancer and found that about a fifth of these cancers use NMD to become stronger. This is because NMD ensures that the message from a gene called TP53, which ordinarily protects cells from developing cancer, is almost completely eliminated.

    Without NMD, a mutated TP53 might still retain some activity, but NMD ensures that this is not the case.

    The team predicts that because cancers essentially feed on NMD, they become dependent on it in some cases. If scientists were therefore able to inhibit or control the process, it is possible that they could also control cancer and prevent the progression of the dis

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