cancer tagged posts

Scientists discover ‘Toolkit’ to Fix DNA Breaks Associated with Aging, Cancer and Motor Neuron Disease

Experts discover toolkit to repair DNA breaks associated with aging, cancer and motor neuron disease
TEX264 acts at replication forks. Credit: Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15000-w

A new “toolkit” to repair damaged DNA that can lead to aging, cancer and motor neuron disease (MND) has been discovered by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Oxford.

Published in Nature Communications, the research shows that a protein called TEX264, together with other enzymes, is able to recognize and “eat” toxic proteins that can stick to DNA and cause it to become damaged. An accumulation of broken, damaged DNA can cause cellular aging, cancer and neurological diseases such as MND.

Until now, ways of repairing this sort of DNA damage have been poorly understood, but scientists hope to exploit this novel repair toolkit of proteins to protect us from aging, can...

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Scientists Learn how to Drug Wily Class of Disease-Causing Enzymes

An illustration of a GTPase thethered to a cell.
A GTPase (center) tethered to the outside of a cell (bottom), with several drugs in the distance. Credit: Inmywork Studio

Drugs for the K-Ras oncogene inspire an approach for targeting the GTPases, a family of enzymes whose dysfunction can lead to Parkinson’s and many other diseases.

UCSF scientists have discovered how to target a class of molecular switches called GTPases that are involved in a myriad of diseases from Parkinson’s to cancer and have long been thought to be “undruggable.”

Because of their slippery exteriors, the GTPases have remained largely out of reach of modern drug discovery, with the exception of the notorious cancer-causing GTPase called K-Ras.

On a hunch, the team tested a dozen drugs that target K-Ras against a handful of GTPases they had mutated to mak...

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Common Immune Response is found to be Protective Across Many Diseases

Common immune response protective across many diseases
Overview of study design, analytic methods, and dataset multi-omics. (A) Cartoon describing the collected single-cell and bulk multi-omic datasets with paired clinical data from infection, autoimmunity, and cancer contexts. (B) Cartoon depicting experimental and analytic strategies for single-cell and bulk data with a focus on NKG2A/C-expressing cell types. (C) Cartoon demonstrating NKG2A+ and NKG2C+ bias assignment at single-cell and bulk levels. (D) Cartoon displaying the different clinical and biological -omics to be compared between NKG2A+ and patients with an NKG2C+ bias. Credit: Cell Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.113872

Combined, infection, autoimmunity and cancer account for 4 out of every 10 deaths worldwide, and represent major global health challenges...

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Novel Regulator of Immune Evasion in Cancer identified

Novel regulator of immune evasion in cancer identified
Representative images from immunohistochemical staining of PD-L1, ATXN3, IRF1, and HIF-2α in human lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and melanoma patients. Courtesy of Deyu Fang, PhD. Credit: Journal of Clinical Investigation (2023). DOI: 10.1172/JCI167728

Northwestern Medicine investigators have identified a previously unknown regulator of tumor immune evasion, which may help improve the efficacy of current and future antitumor immunotherapies, according to recent findings published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

“The study provides a molecular insight into understanding why some cancer patients cannot be treated by the checkpoint blockade antitumor therapy, but others can,” said Deyu Fang, Ph.D...

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