A new target for cancer drugs
Suppressing cancer cells’ ability to cope with damage to their DNA could enhance dramatically the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs such as cisplatin, according to a new pair of papers from MIT biologists.In studies of mice, the researchers found that slowing down a specific system for tolerating DNA damage in cancer cells not only prolonged the lives of the mice, but also prevented relapsed tumors from becoming resistant to chemotherapy, and made tumors much less likely to spread to other parts of the body. Two enzymes that play key roles in tumor cells’ response to DNA damage could be an enticing target for new cancer drugs, according to Michael Hemann and Graham Walker, senior authors of the two papers. Their new findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Nov. 8. “What’s promising is that there are quite a few ways one could go about...