Potential to Cure Cancer
- Leela Sharma
- Sep 15, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 18
Author: Leela Sharma
Date: 09-15-23
I recently read an article in the Yale News about a very exciting study that was published on July 6, 2023 in the Journal of Science. I have attached the link to the article below but also wanted to summarize it here.
The study had discovered that cancer cells have an extra chromosome and the cells depend on those chromosomes for growing the tumors. This is a very significant development because if scientists and researchers could somehow eliminate the extra chromosomes, this could prevent the cells from forming tumors. This may provide a breakthrough approach in the treatment of cancer!
I knew that human cells typically have 23 pairs of chromosomes but I did not know that at times, there could be anomalies and cells might have extra chromosomes. This condition is called aneuploidy. Researchers have known for a long time now, that all cancers are aneuploid. However it was not clear what role the extra chromosome played. Scientists have now been able to use the gene engineering technique CRISPR to eliminate these extra chromosomes. This is a new and important technical development. Scientists will be able to better understand how these extra chromosomes function.
According to Jason Sheltzer, assistant professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the study, the researchers used CRISPR to remove the third copy of the long portion of chromosome 1, also known as the “q arm”. The q arm, which occurs early on in cancer development, is found in several types of cancers and is linked to disease progression.
“When we eliminated aneuploidy from the genomes of these cancer cells, it compromised the malignant potential of those cells and they lost their ability to form tumors,” Sheltzer explained.
Researchers found out that when genes were overrepresented (because they were encoded in three chromosomes instead of the usual two), they stimulated cancer growth. With this new study, researchers have discovered that eliminating those cells that have an extra chromosome disrupts the cancers’ tumor forming abilities.
Research has shown that cells with an extra copy of Chromosome 1, known as UCK2 are more sensitive to certain drugs, because of the overexpression of UCK2. This further led them to observe that these drugs could then be used on cells to reduce the number of aneuploidic cells to create a cell population with more normal chromosomes and hence less potential to become cancerous. The article says that “when researchers created a mixture with 20% aneuploid cells and 80% normal cells, aneuploid cells took over: after nine days, they made up 75% of the mixture. But when the researchers exposed the 20% aneuploid mixture to one of the UCK2-dependent drugs, the aneuploid cells comprised just 4% of the mix nine days later”.
“This told us that aneuploidy can potentially function as a therapeutic target for cancer,” said Sheltzer. “Almost all cancers are aneuploid, so if you have some way of selectively targeting those aneuploid cells, that could, theoretically, be a good way to target cancer while having minimal effect on normal, non-cancerous tissue.”
More research will need to be done before this approach can be tested at a clinical trial but this is super exciting news. This might be just the breakthrough that is needed to combat this deadly disease!
Link to the Original Article:
Comments