Monday, November 16, 2020

Two treatment methods enhance chemotherapy by the same means: cellular senescence

Good news! Cancer is history! Are humans finally outsmarting cancer? It appears so! Unfortunately, the article is not well written in a sense that you can easily extract what progress was made here.

"The [researchers] previously discovered that the compound JH-RE-06 enhanced the tumor-shrinking effects of DNA-damaging chemotherapies. While they expected JH-RE-06 to amplify programmed cell death induced by DNA damage, two studies appearing in PNAS showed that JH-RE-06, or genetically ablating the pathway targeted by JH-RE-06, instead puts tumor cells in a permanently dormant state known as senescence. Because senescent cells are often cleared by immune cells, these findings suggest a complementary approach to traditional chemotherapies. " (Source)

"... Many widely-used chemotherapies, like cisplatin, kill tumors by damaging their DNA and inducing programmed cell death. But cells are resilient, and many can continue to function with the help of repair enzymes that simply bypass the damage and continue to replicate the DNA. As a result, some tumors not only defy death, but gain mutations that render them more resistant to treatment or spur new malignancies elsewhere. ... The cells appeared to be in a permanently dormant state known as senescence — not yet dead but unable to proliferate. JH-RE-06 was altering cisplatin function by triggering a second molecular pathway independent of programmed cell death. ..."

Two treatment methods enhance chemotherapy by the same means: cellular senescence

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