"New insight into how some cancers begin"
The leading UK charity funding research into cancer, Worldwide Cancer Research, devotes a report to Salvador Aznar-Benitah's work on two new proteins that, when faulty, can allow cancer to develop.
Published in the journal eLife, the study reports a key role for the Dnmt3a and Dnmt3b proteins in protecting cells from cancer.
Link to Worldwide Cancer Research
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These proteins are a potential therapeutic target for enhancing the effect of some cancer treatments.
Inhibition of TLK proteins triggers the Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres pathway, a common process in some of the most aggressive types of cancer, such as glioblastoma.
The study, performed by the Genomic Instability and Cancer Laboratory at IRB Barcelona, has been published in the journal Cell Reports.
The mechanism unveiled triggers a mutation fog, causing hundreds of mutations in each tumor, which spread through the genome of lung, head-and-neck and breast cancers.
Researchers from the Genome Data Science Lab have identified the antiviral APOBEC3A enzyme as the major cause of this new type of hypermutation.
Published in Nature Genetics, the study shows how the mutation fog process generates many oncogenic “cancer driver” mutations, thus accelerating tumour development.
Researchers at IRB Barcelona discover a new mechanism in estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer cells.
The inhibition of CPEB2, a key factor in the estrogen signalling pathway, causes cancer cells to proliferate less and protects mice against luminal breast cancer.
