Biologists ID new cancer weakness
About half of all cancer patients have a mutation in a gene called p53, which allows tumors to survive and continue growing even after chemotherapy severely damages their DNA. A new study from MIT biologists has found that tumor cells with mutated p53 can be made much more vulnerable to chemotherapy by blocking another gene called MK2. In a study of mice, tumors lacking both p53 and MK2 shrank dramatically when treated with the drug cisplatin, while tumors with functional MK2 kept growing after treatment.The findings suggest that giving cancer patients a combination of a DNA-damaging drug and an MK2 inhibitor could be very effective, says Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor in Science and senior author of a paper describing the research in the Nov. 14 issue of the journal Cell Reports.Several drugs that inhibit MK2 are now in clinical trials to treat inflammatory diseases such as arthritis...