Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Pancreatic cancer breakthrough: Scientists turn cancer cells into normal cells



A recent study in pancreatic cancer research has shown that the pancreatic cancer cells can be converted back towards normal cells when introducing a protein called E47. In the article, it is said that E47 binds to a specific sequence of DNA that controls the genes involved in differentiation and growth of pancreatic cancer cells. Lead author of the study Dr. Pamela Itkin-Ansari explains that "for the first time, we have shown that overexpression of a single gene can reduce the tumor-promoting potential of pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells and reprogram them toward their original cell type." When generating human pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cell lines with higher than normal levels of E47 it caused the mutated cells to stall in the G0/G1 growth phase. From that point the cells were then converted back towards the normal digestive enzyme-secreting cells called acinar cells where they originated from. 
When introducing the reprogrammed cancer cells in vivo into mice their ability to form tumors was greatly diminished compared to untreated cells. Future research will be conducted on patient derived tumor tissue to see the results of E47 on the mutated cells and hopefully this can lead to a new treatment for pancreatic adenocarcinoma. I found this article interesting because pancreatic cancer has affected my family. E47's ability to change the cancer cells back to a nonthreatening phenotype provides hope for the 40,000 people who die from this disease each year. I hope researchers can produce a drug that can cause an overexpression of E47 and help cure this silent, undetectable cancer.  

Primary article can be found here

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