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.
Comments (6)
by David Smith
It’s past time for patients and their loved ones to organize armed squads to take back what we taxpayers and donators have paid for.
by Paul Epping
Amazing approach and understanding of the human body as a chemical information processor. Keep going!
by Nicole
Hopefully he sells it to Big Pharma. Otherwise, those who need it will never see it since they’ll squish him like a cockroach. With the help of the FDA, of course, whose top priority is Big Pharma profits. I shit you not.
by izumi3682
How soon until we see clinical application of this and so many other theories and hypotheses? 15 years at a dead minimum minimum. Sometimes the singularity starts to sound like the empiricist’s rapture…
by SpottedMarley
how do you beat cancer? you give it cancer!
awesome
by Bri
That’s hitting the nail on the head