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  Awards Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Ctr. Boston Medical Center Boston University Brigham and Women's Hospital Broad Institute Cambridge Health Alliance Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Ctr. Children's Hospital Boston Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Grants Harvard University Joslin Diabetes Center Lahey Clinic Mass. General Hospital Mass. Health Law McLean Hospital MIT New England Baptist Hospital Personnel Moves Public Health Research Short White Coat Tufts-New England Medical Center Tufts University UMass Memorial Medical Center University of Massachusetts VA Medical Centers    A Healthy Blog Running A Hospital Nature Network Boston SciBos - Corie Lok's blog Kevin, M.D. Blog, MD Dr. Flea's blog Nurse at small Your Child's Health Blog Healthy Children blog WBUR's CommonHealth Other Globe Blogs
Elizabeth Cooney is a health reporter for the Worcester Telegram &
Gazette.
Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
Scott Allen Alice Dembner Carey Goldberg Liz Kowalczyk Stephen Smith Colin Nickerson Beth Daley Karen Weintraub, Deputy Health and Science Editor, and Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor. Short White Coat blogger Ishani Ganguli  |
« Today's Globe: diabetes genes, delirium and dementia, breast density, "me-too" drugs | Main | MIT professor says he's lost 14 pounds during hunger strike » Monday, February 12, 2007MIT research IDs tumor defense mechanismMIT scientists have identified a new defense mechanism that tumor cells use to survive chemotherapy, a discovery that could lead to drugs that make existing cancer drugs work better at lower doses. Writing in the cover story of today's Cancer Cell, Dr. Michael B. Yaffe and his biomedical engineering colleagues explain that once tumors lose their ability to repair DNA that has been damaged by drugs or radiation, they turn to a signaling pathway involved in inflammation in order to survive. "The exciting thing is we can now target this pathway," said Yaffe, who is also a surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and affiliated with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. "It won't make normal cells any more susceptible to chemo but it will make cancer cells much more sensitive." The scientists tested their idea by turning off the inflammation pathway in mouse tumors. After they gave low doses of the common cancer drug cisplatin to the mice, their tumors melted away, Yaffe said. A drug that works against a molecule important in inflammation called MK2 is already being tested. Originally conceived as a treatment for arthritis, it may be modified to thwart just the inflammatory pathway that cancer cells use to survive. "Our results suggest it might have a second life in helping to treat cancer patients," Yaffe said. "It could mean standard chemotherapy would suddenly become much more effective." Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 12:00 PM
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