More than 200 researchers investigating colon cancer tumors have found genetic vulnerabilities that could lead to powerful new treatments. The hope is that drugs designed to strike these weak spots will eventually stop a cancer that is now almost inevitably fatal once it has spread. Scientists increasingly see cancer as a genetic disease defined not so much by where it starts -- colon, liver, brain, breast -- but by genetic aberrations that are its Achilles' heel. And with an understanding of which genetic changes make a cancer grow and thrive, they say they can figure out how best to mount an attack. They caution, however, that most of the drugs needed to target the colon cancer mutations have yet to be developed. The colon cancer study, published Wednesday, July 18, in Nature, is the first part of a sweeping effort that is expected to produce a flood of discoveries for a wide range of cancers. "There are so many different ways that you can attack this tumor type," said Raju Kucherlapati, the principal investigator for the colon cancer project and a professor of genetics and of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "We have an opportunity to completely change the landscape." … Continue reading →

More than 200 researchers investigating colon cancer tumors have found genetic vulnerabilities that could lead to powerful new treatments. The hope is that drugs designed to strike these weak spots will eventually stop a cancer that is now almost inevitably fatal once it has spread. Scientists increasingly see cancer as a genetic disease defined not so much by where it starts colon, liver, brain, breast but by genetic aberrations that are its Achilles' heel. And with a detailed understanding of which genetic changes make a cancer grow and thrive, they say they can figure out how best to mount an attack. They caution that most of the drugs needed to target the cancer mutations have yet to be developed. The colon cancer study, published Wednesday in Nature, is the first part of a sweeping effort that is expected to produce a flood of discoveries for a wide range of cancers. "There are so many different ways that you can attack this tumor type," said Raju Kucherlapati, the principal investigator for the colon cancer project and a professor of genetics and of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "We have an opportunity to completely change the landscape." Researchers have studied colon cancer … Continue reading →

(Phys.org) -- New research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sheds light on pluripotencythe ability of embryonic stem cells to renew themselves indefinitely and to differentiate into all types of mature cells. Solving this problem, which is a major challenge in modern biology, could expedite the use of embryonic stem cells in cell therapy and regenerative medicine. If scientists can replicate the mechanisms that make pluripotency possible, they could create cells in the laboratory which could be implanted in humans to cure diseases characterized by cell death, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and other degenerative diseases. To shed light on these processes, researchers in the lab of Dr. Eran Meshorer, in the Department of Genetics at the Hebrew Universitys Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, are combining molecular, microscopic and genomic approaches. Meshorer's team is focusing on epigenetic pathwayswhich cause biological changes without a corresponding change in the DNA sequencethat are specific to embryonic stem cells. The molecular basis for epigenetic mechanisms is chromatin, which is comprised of a cell's DNA and structural and regulatory proteins. In groundbreaking research performed by Shai Melcer, a PhD student in the Meshorer lab, the mechanisms which support an open chromatin conformation in embryonic … Continue reading →