Cancer Beats The Clock
New Paper from the Barr Lab
Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells that must be replenished and replaced in a timely manner throughout our lives. New cells are created by the division of existing cells. If this goes wrong it leads to diseases, most notably cancer. When it comes to cell division, it turns out that slow and steady doesn’t win the race! Taking too long to divide is a sure sign that something has gone wrong within the cell, so a protective timing mechanism disqualifies damaged cells from further cell division.
New Cancer Research UK funded research from the Barr lab, carried out in the Biochemistry department in Oxford, has discovered how a protein called MDM2 is responsible for timing the length of the cell division process. If cell division takes too long, more than 1 hour,MDM2 runs out ensuring that these cells are instructed to stop growing by a protein called p53. This protective pathway no longer works in the majority of cancers, and cancer cells are thus able to continue growing and dividing despite being damaged.
The discovery of the way MDM2 works as a timer for cell division shines important new light on the way damaged cells are stopped from growing and provides insight into how cancers form.
The paper, published in Nature Cell Biology is available to read here:
Graphical Abstract
