Molecular discovery suggests new strategy to fight cancer drug resistance
Sunday, June 20, 2010 - 17:30
in Health & Medicine
Scientists have found a way to disable a common protein that often thwarts chemotherapy treatment of several major forms of cancer. The researchers discovered, surprisingly, that they could exploit a small portion of this anti-death protein, called MCL-1, to make a molecular tool that specifically blocked MCL-1's "pro-survival" action, allowing standard cancer drugs to kill the tumor cells by apoptosis, or programmed cell death.