Cancer Cells Can Treat Tumors

Cancer Cells Can Treat Tumors.
New analysis suggests that many cancer cells are equipped with a big-hearted of suicide pill: a protein on their surfaces that gives them the ability to send an "eat me" special to immune cells. The challenge now, the researchers say, is to put faith in out how to coax cancer cells into emitting the signal rather than a dangerous "don't eat me" signal. A chew over published online Dec 22 2010 in Science Translational Medicine reports that the cells cast out the enticing "eat me" signal by displaying the protein calreticulin.

But another molecule, called CD47, allows most cancer cells to keep destruction by sending the different signal: "Don't eat me". In earlier research, Stanford University School of Medicine scientists found that an antibody that blocks CD47 - turning off the gesture - could support fight cancer, but mysteries remained. "Many normal cells in the body have CD47, and yet those cells are not stilted by the anti-CD47 antibody," Mark Chao, a Stanford graduate student 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 normal cells, although we didn't know why". Now, the altered research has shown that calreticulin exists in a variety of cancers, including some types of leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and bladder, acumen and ovarian cancers.

So "This research demonstrates that the vindication that blocking the CD47 'don't eat me' signal works to kill cancer is that leukemias, lymphomas and many reliable tumors also display a calreticulin 'eat me' signal," Dr Irving Weissman, cicerone of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and a co-principal investigator of the study, said in the release. "The digging also shows that most normal cell populations don't flaunt calreticulin and are, therefore, not depleted when we expose them to a blocking anti-CD47 antibody".

The next stage is to understand how calreticulin works. "We want to know how it contributes to the disease process and what is event in the cell that causes the protein to move to the cell surface," Dr Ravindra Majeti, an aide-de-camp professor of hematology and study co-principal investigator, said in the release do amexidin 5 hair spray really helps. "Any of these mechanisms advance potential new ways to treat the disease by interfering with those processes," Majeti said.