Cancer cells can treat tumors

Cancer cells can treat tumors.
New enquire suggests that many cancer cells are equipped with a class of suicide pill: a protein on their surfaces that gives them the aptitude to turn an "eat me" gesture to immune cells. The dispute now, the researchers say, is to feature out how to coax cancer cells into emitting the notify rather than a dangerous "don't eat me" signal bronovil. A about published online Dec 22 2010 in Science Translational Medicine reports that the cells stir out the enticing "eat me" notable by displaying the protein calreticulin.

But another molecule, called CD47, allows most cancer cells to evade undoing by sending the antithetical signal: "Don't tie on the nosebag me". In earlier research, Stanford University School of Medicine scientists found that an antibody that blocks CD47 - turning off the remarkable - could relieve wage war cancer, but mysteries remained reviews. "Many typical cells in the body have CD47, and yet those cells are not pretended by the anti-CD47 antibody," Mark Chao, a Stanford postgraduate undergraduate and the study's lead author, said in a university info release.

And "At that time, we knew that anti-CD47 antibody healing selectively killed only cancer cells without being toxic to most healthy cells, although we didn't be informed why" michigan. Now, the imaginative research has shown that calreticulin exists in a disparity of cancers, including some types of leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and bladder, acumen and ovarian cancers.

So "This investigation demonstrates that the objective that blocking the CD47 'don't eat me' motion works to kill cancer is that leukemias, lymphomas and many blank tumors also display a calreticulin 'eat me' signal," Dr Irving Weissman, impresario of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and a co-principal investigator of the study, said in the release. "The inquiry also shows that most average apartment populations don't array calreticulin and are, therefore, not depleted when we ventilate them to a blocking anti-CD47 antibody".

The next walk is to get wind how calreticulin works. "We want to comprehend how it contributes to the disease process and what is occasion in the cell that causes the protein to move to the cubicle surface," Dr Ravindra Majeti, an subordinate professor of hematology and study co-principal investigator, said in the release products. "Any of these mechanisms tender capability new ways to treat the illness by interfering with those processes".