By turning on a particular gene, researchers have made colon-cancer cells in mice revert back to normal ones.
Scott Lowe at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and his colleagues engineered mice so that they could use a small RNA molecule to switch on the Apc gene, a tumour suppressor that is mutated in most colorectal cancers. Turning on this gene shrank precancerous polyps in the colon, and cells in the polyps developed and behaved normally. Even reactivating Apc in full-blown tumours bearing other cancer-driving mutations made the cells non-cancerous.
Silencing Apc in 3D cultures of mouse colon cells led to cancer-like growth (pictured, left; scale bars are 50 μm), whereas switching it back on restored normal cell division (pictured, right). Targeting the cell-signalling pathway to which Apc belongs (called Wnt) could be a therapeutic strategy, the authors say.
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Colon-cancer cells made normal. Nature 522, 394 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/522394c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/522394c
