Leukemia's Waterloo: The Battle For Cell Production
To fight leukemia, we have to fight on its terms, and that means understanding the nature of the fight for superiority between mutated genes and normal genes, according to a paper that investigated Acute Myeloid Leukemia to understand why leukemic cells are not able to develop normally into mature blood cells. Stem cells in the bone marrow generate billions of different blood cells each day. The process resembles a production line with genes acting as regulators to control each step of the blood formation. Leukemia arises when the DNA encoding regulators in the stem cells is changed by a mutation. When a mutation occurs in the relevant regulator genes, the finely balanced order of the production line is disrupted with drastic consequences. read more