Gene Identified That Prevents Stem Cells from Turning Cancerous

[HuckleB]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101014191151.htm

"Stem cells, the prodigious precursors of all the tissues in our body, can make almost anything, given the right circumstances. Including, unfortunately, cancer. Now research from Rockefeller University shows that having too many stem cells, or stem cells that live for too long, can increase the odds of developing cancer. By identifying a mechanism that regulates programmed cell death in precursor cells for blood, or hematopoietic stem cells, the work is the first to connect the death of such cells to a later susceptibility to tumors in mice. It also provides evidence of the potentially carcinogenic downside to stem cell treatments, and suggests that nature has sought to balance stem cells' regenerative power against their potentially lethal potency.

Research associate Maria Garcia-Fernandez, Hermann Steller, head of the Strang Laboratory of Apoptosis and Cancer Biology, and their colleagues explored the activity of a gene called Sept4, which encodes a protein, ARTS, that increases programmed cell death, or apoptosis, by antagonizing other proteins that prevent cell death. ARTS was originally discovered by Sarit Larisch, a visiting professor at Rockefeller, and is found to be lacking in human leukemia and other cancers, suggesting it suppresses tumors. To study the role of ARTS, the experimenters bred a line of mice genetically engineered to lack the Sept4 gene.

For several years, Garcia-Fernandez studied cells that lacked ARTS, looking for signs of trouble relating to cell death. In mature B and T cells, she could not find any, however, so she began to look at cells earlier and earlier in development, until finally she was comparing hematopoietic progenitor and stem cells. Here she found crucial differences, to be published in Genes and Development.

Newborn ARTS-deprived mice had about twice as many hematopoietic stem cells as their normal, ARTS-endowed peers, and those stem cells were extraordinary in their ability to survive experimentally induced mutations.

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Interesting progress...

:hi: