Pharmacy Daily | A new way to kill cancer cells found

A NEW paper published in Nature Cell Biology has challenged previous thinking about human cells and opened up new treatment options that will better harness the immune system to recognise and attack cancer.

Prof Mark Dawson, Associate Director for Research Translation and Consultant Haematologist at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, said patients with lymphoma and lung cancer could be among the first to benefit from the findings.

"Our research discovery has major implications for many different fields of research because we need to understand how cells make decisions and change the way they act in order to find new ways to treat cancer," Prof Dawson said.

"All cells carry a set of genes that lay dormant waiting for instructions to either be active or silent.

"Previously we thought that if we inhibited a protein called menin, which had been shown to activate genes, that these dormant genes would become silenced.

"However, our research discovered that the opposite happens, and we activate these dormant genes," he concluded.

"Some cancer cells keep genes that direct our immune system in this dormant state," said Dr Christina Sparbier, PhD student in the Dawson lab at Peter MacCallum Centre who led the work.

"We found that by removing menin, we increase the expression of the genes so that the immune system can more readily detect these cancer cells and kill them."

For more information on the findings CLICK HERE.