I'm still waiting for the magic moment that will tell me that biologists are using cell surface antigens to reprogram cancer cells.
However, there was news recently about how scientists are closely examining histones as a means towards reprogramming. You see, histones are used by the cell to keep DNA in check. As any of you who have had the misfortune of having to unravel a ball of string know, stringy material like DNA would be impossible to keep orderly if there weren't some means of keeping them neatly spooled. This is where histones come in. They are the spools for DNA. It seems as if there might be a mechanism in place-involving histones--whereby the histones are manipulated by epigenetic factors in order to facilitate or defacilitate the transcription of DNA.
In other words, Cancer cells are causing certain histones to allow a certain DNA expression. If we can shut down the active histones, we may be able to shut down cancer; but this would only work if histones were found to be specific enough for each type of cancer. If you closed down the histones from a metastatic lung cell, you do not want your treatment to affect any other histone (as for example, a normal liver cell's histones).
To summarize previous posts to this blog, cells, like ants, people, and organizations of all kinds need to communicate with their neighbors. When they fail at this, cells try communicating using language that previously worked for them. But that language was used at an embryonic stage and no one else in the adult organism is using that language. Cancer cells then become outcasts and only succeed in creating chaotic embryos that never develop because no other cell is speaking quite the same language. They end up metastasizing to a certain area because there they think they have found a home.
However, there was news recently about how scientists are closely examining histones as a means towards reprogramming. You see, histones are used by the cell to keep DNA in check. As any of you who have had the misfortune of having to unravel a ball of string know, stringy material like DNA would be impossible to keep orderly if there weren't some means of keeping them neatly spooled. This is where histones come in. They are the spools for DNA. It seems as if there might be a mechanism in place-involving histones--whereby the histones are manipulated by epigenetic factors in order to facilitate or defacilitate the transcription of DNA.
In other words, Cancer cells are causing certain histones to allow a certain DNA expression. If we can shut down the active histones, we may be able to shut down cancer; but this would only work if histones were found to be specific enough for each type of cancer. If you closed down the histones from a metastatic lung cell, you do not want your treatment to affect any other histone (as for example, a normal liver cell's histones).
To summarize previous posts to this blog, cells, like ants, people, and organizations of all kinds need to communicate with their neighbors. When they fail at this, cells try communicating using language that previously worked for them. But that language was used at an embryonic stage and no one else in the adult organism is using that language. Cancer cells then become outcasts and only succeed in creating chaotic embryos that never develop because no other cell is speaking quite the same language. They end up metastasizing to a certain area because there they think they have found a home.
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