A NEW line of attack on cancer could be on the cards, say researchers in Australia who have discovered how some cells manage to keep dividing.
Normal cells can't become cancerous because their chromosomes have fuses, or "telomeres", on their ends that get shorter every time a cell divides. This eventually stops cell division.
To turn cancerous, cells must patch up their telomeres, which they usually do with an enzyme called telomerase. Blocking telomerase looks like a promising way of treating cancer (
But some cancer cells manage to patch up their telomeres without telomerase. Now a team led by Roger Reddel of the Children's Medical Research Institute in Sydney has shown that these cells may do it by "copying" existing telomeres.
The team marked telomeres in human cells of this type with pieces of bacterial DNA. These tags soon turned up in the ...
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