"Health News - Medicine, Diet and Fitness"

By Lindsay Braun, Ivanhoe Men’s health Correspondent

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — The key to stopping cancer may lie in one drug’s ability to first speed it up. By accelerating the activity of a cancer-promoting gene, it may be possible to send cancer cells into overdrive until they self-destruct.

Recent research reveals an FDA approved drug called bortezomib is able to selectively kill cancer cells by promoting an acceleration oncogene called c-MYC. By creating a heightened release of c-MYC, a reaction occurs in which a cell-killing protein called NOXA is released.

Study author Maria Soengas, Ph.D., assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Michigan, compared the process of stopping cancer cells to stopping a bulletproof sports car. “Cancer cells go very fast, like a sports car. If the car is bullet proof, you need something very strong to stop it from the inside,” said Dr. Soengas. “In the cancer cell, once you find the genes, which we call oncogenes, which are equivalent to the accelerator on the car, the idea is to block them. But the problem is that tumors have multiple accelerators, it’s not easy to press their brakes. What we’re doing instead of pushing the breaks, we’re accelerating so that we can burn from the inside.”

The study looked at this effect in melanoma tumor cells, but researchers believe the same effect can be achieved in other types of cancer cells. “We’ve found NOXA in a variety of tumor cells,” said Dr. Soengas. “We’ve reported finding NOXA in cells from breast cancer to different types of leukemia.”

Study authors say they hope these findings will help lay the groundwork for future research. “Now we understand better how these cells can die,” said Dr. Soengas. “There are future studies to be done. Now that we can take advantage of knowing the mechanisms, we can think about compounds that further activate c-MYC.”

This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, which offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, click on: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.

SOURCE: Ivanhoe interview with Maria Soengas, Ph.D., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Aid / Disasters, Breast Cancer, Cancer / Oncology, Dermatology, Medical News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.