Scientist turns cancer on or off inside cell
UW researchers have discovered a way to artificially make a cell cancerous and then reverse the process of unchecked cell growth.
In a laboratory, the scientists took a cancerous gene and added it to a normal cell in a Petri dish. To prove that the cells had become cancerous, the scientists then injected the altered material under the skin of mice. The mice formed tumors within three to five weeks.
To reverse the process, the researchers took the altered, cancerous material and added a different gene, which counteracted the cancer-causing action of the original gene. When these twice-altered cells were injected into mice, tumors did not grow.
Switching cancer on and off in a Petri dish is only a small step toward treating cancer in humans, warns Dr. Deborah Cool, a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry.
“The real tumor situation is very complicated. These studies simplify what’s going on in a person with cancer. It looks promising and it’s exciting, but applying this to human cancers is many, many years away,” she says.