Novel noninvasive therapy prevents breast cancer formation in mice - 0 views
-
A novel breast-cancer therapy that partially reverses the cancerous state in cultured breast tumor cells and prevents cancer development in mice
-
a new way to treat early stages of the disease without resorting to surgery, chemotherapy or radiation
-
The therapy emerged from a sophisticated effort to reverse-engineer gene networks to identify genes that drive cancer
- ...31 more annotations...
-
The same strategy could lead to many new therapies that disable cancer-causing genes no current drugs can stop, and it also can be used to find therapies for other diseases
-
idea would be start giving it early on and sustain treatment throughout life to prevent cancer development or progression
-
early diagnosis could potentially save lives; however, few of those lesions go on to become tumors and doctors have no good way of predicting which ones will
-
many women currently undergo surgery, chemotherapy and radiation who might never develop the disease.
-
some women with a high hereditary risk of breast cancer have chosen to undergo preemptive mastectomies.
-
A therapy that heals rather than kills cancerous tissue could potentially help all these patients, as well as men who develop the disease
-
he treatments that accomplish that, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, often damage healthy tissue, causing harsh side effects
-
First they had to identify the culprit genes among the thousands that are active in a cell at any moment
-
looking for cancer-causing genes, they search for individual genes that become active as cancer develops.
-
a systems biology expert who has developed a sophisticated mathematical and computational method to reverse-engineer bacterial gene networks.
-
honed the computational network to work for the first time on the more complex gene networks of mice and humans
-
The refined method helped the scientists spot more than 100 genes that acted suspiciously just before milk-duct cells in the breast begin to overgrow
-
The team narrowed their list down to six genes that turn other genes on or off, and then narrowed it further to a single gene called HoxA1 that had the strongest statistical link to cancer
-
treated cancerous cells with a short piece of RNA called a small interfering RNA (siRNA) that blocks only the HoxA1 gene
-
The cells reversed their march to malignancy, stopping their runaway growth and forming hollow balls as healthy cells do
-
The siRNA treatment also stopped breast cancer in a line of mice genetically engineered to have a gene that causes all of them to develop cancer
-
They packed the siRNA into nanoparticles called lipidoids that allow for genes to be silenced for weeks inside the body