Making cancer cells forget what they are to cease their deadly proliferation

Jay Bradner believes that cancer can be defeated through control of epigenetics
August 9, 2012

Jay Bradner, a physician and chemical biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, makes defeating cancer sound easy, Nature News reports.

“With all the things cancer is trying to do to kill our patient, how does it remember it is cancer?” he asked his rapt TEDx audience. Bradner says that the answer lies in epigenetics, the programs that manage the genome.

Findings over the past ten years have strongly implicated dysregulation of epigenetic instructions in cancer, where growth-driving genes express like crazy and genes that keep cell division in check are silenced. Bradner’s aim is to create a drug that can rewrite those instructions so that cancer cells forget what they are and cease their deadly proliferation.