From the first moment my wife discovered
she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even
ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have
received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than
mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started
this blog…
Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast
cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites,
journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and
share them with you. Today: Researchers discover a way to break cancer’s
vicious cycle.
“…the so-called
Hippo pathway, a network of proteins that are important for normal cell and
tissue growth but which often goes haywire in cancer, (named after its role in
controlling organ size so that organs grow abnormally large, or ‘hippo-like,’
when the pathway breaks down)…normally keeps cell proliferation in check, is
inactivated in many cancers, so far there was no good way to target it with
drugs...”
Reading this as
someone who loves a breast cancer victim or survivor, you know that the most horrific
aspect of cancer is that it takes the cells of a normal person, which grow to
keep us healthy, and sends them on an ever accelerating spiral of uncontrolled
growth. Bits of the “crazy cells” break off, drift through the blood and set up
housekeeping elsewhere in the healthy body (metastasizing) and soon become
impossible to control.
While researchers
and doctors KNOW this, there hasn’t been an effective way of reaching into
cells and turning off the gene that cancers turn on. They may have found a
protein that will do that. Thus far, they’ve only worked with breast cancer
cells in a test tube (in vitro) and in lab mice, and bladder cancer cells in
the same situations.
However, “University
of Toronto researchers have…identified a protein called NUAK2, which is
produced by cancer cells to boost their proliferation [make them grow faster] and
whose presence in tumours is associated with poor disease prognosis [it’s bad
news]…the researchers show that blocking NUAK2 slows down cancer cell growth...”
Please note that
this research is BRAND NEW, published just a few days ago as I write this, so
we’re not talking about a rush to volunteer for a drug test program, but with some
$5.2 BILLION dollars spent on cancer research (https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/budget/fact-book/data/research-funding)
in 2016 alone, ($519,000,000 for breast cancer – half a billion dollars), we
can trust (as much as anyone can!) that the motivation of researchers will be
to bring as many therapies and treatments to bear against cancer as possible.
Long live the
Hippo research!
Image: (Personal photo) Hippo at the Seoul (South Korea) Grand Park Zoo, August 2018
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