Key Step In Programmed Cell Death Discovered 80
Investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have discovered a dance of proteins that protects certain cells from undergoing apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death. Understanding the fine points of apoptosis is important to researchers seeking ways to control this process. In a series of experiments, St. Jude researchers found that if any one of three molecules is missing, certain cells lose the ability to protect themselves from apoptosis. A report on this work appears in the advance online publication of Nature.
Re:Cancer applications? (Score:3, Informative)
Everybody can kill cancer cells.
The art is do do it selectively (to not kill everything else). No breakthrough here.
Not quite (Score:4, Informative)
The proteins identified in the paper protect against apoptosis. If you were to inhibit them, your cells would be more susceptible to apoptosis, not more resistant (which they show using a knockout mouse). More importantly though, apoptosis is an essential process in both development and regulation (particularly the immune response). Indiscriminately inhibiting the apoptotic process would be detrimental to the organism as a whole (resulting in death, not the protection from).
Let's say your body produced neutralizing antibodies to the three proteins (or better yet, you inject humanized antibodies that targeted the proteins), the antibodies would still have to penetrate the cell in order to see their target. You would be much better off making a tat-fusion protein of a dominant-negative form of the protein.
Lastly, we've already identified several molecules that are important for apoptosis. One catagory of such proteins is call the Caspases [wikipedia.org].
Actual article text (Score:5, Informative)
Some brief background (Score:5, Informative)
a) Cancer. This is the big one. Your body has a natural defense against cancer - cells that would become cancerous undergo apoptosis and die. Only when this defense fails do you actually get cancer.
b) Viral Infections. Viruses (and a few bacteria, but it's not the same thing) get inside the individual cells of your body and take them over to make viruses. Again, your body defends itself by inducing apoptosis in affected cells - the virus will typically contain genes to try and prevent this.
c) Some degenerative diseases result from apoptosis being triggerred improperly in certain cells (Parkinsons' disease probably works this way.)
d) Aptoptosis plays a major role in normal human development; if this goes wrong, this may cause certain development defects.
Re:A Dance? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cancer applications? (Score:5, Informative)
Triggering apoptosis is the ultimate goal in cancer treatment. When a normal cell examines itself, and finds that it is genetically different, it will trigger apoptosis in order to sacrifice itself for the good of the being. Tumorigenic cells want to die, but for some reason the apoptosis mechanism never gets triggered, or is triggered and does not work. Therefore if researchers better understand what triggers apoptosis, then tumorigenic cells can be examined for those missing proteins. Perhaps if the apoptosis mechanism can be fixed, we will have a cure for the majority of cancer. There will still be a small number of tumorigenic cells which don't know they are different, thus have a perfectly working apoptosis mechanism which was never triggered.
Lets try putting this in computer terms. Say when you copy a file by downloading it off the internet, the file itself wants to ensure you have an exact duplicate. Therefore the file performs its own CRC check once it is downloaded. If it fails the CRC check, it deletes itself and you have to download another copy. Now imagine this is a file sharing operation, thus your copy gets shared with many others who are downloading the file from you. If your copy became corrupt in the download process, yet didn't delete itself, a corrupt version of the file would be spread across the Internet (Pandemonium! Cats and dogs sleeping together! Chaos!). Thus wouldn't you want to fix the broken mechanism so that the corrupt file deleted itself, so that the process is started over? Unfortunately there is also a minuscule chance that a corrupt file will generate an identical CRC value thus never triggering the deletion.
Re:Cancer applications? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:immortality available to who? (Score:5, Informative)
Programmed cell death happens in cells that are ready to die because they have become damaged or non-functional in some way. If you stop this natural mechanism you won't get immortality, you get a body that dies much faster, probably within weeks.