Targeting Cancer's Achilles Heel

摘要

In 2005，researchers in the U.K. struck upon a new way to kill cancer cells. A London-based team led by Alan Ashworth, currently head of the University of California, San Francisco's cancer center, was working with cells harboring BRCA mutations—genetic perturbations that predispose humans to breast and other cancers. BRCAl and BRCA2 proteins are part of the cell's homologous recombination (HR) machinery, and help repair doublestrand breaks in DNA. When they are dysfunctional, cells accumulate mutations.