The body has a large number of mechanisms to prevent cancer from forming.
For a defective cell to become cancerous, it must first disable apoptosis, a self-destruct switch programmed into all cells.
Disabling this switch allows the faulty cell to replicate and spread, becoming cancerous.
A new study is looking at how this process works and whether it can be forcibly activated in cancer cells to destroy them.
Clay Clark, Chair and Professor of Biology at the University of Texas has worked to reconstruct the ancestor of the enzyme responsible for apoptosis, a group called effector caspases.
These enzymes have been around for more than a billion years, and Clark used computer simulations to track their evolution in half that time.
Using a process known as ancestral reconstruction, Clay analyzed changes found in enzymes from a large number of descendants to deduce the structure of proteins 650 million years ago.
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Clark explains that his research could advance cancer treatments by learning how to activate the self-destruct mechanism of cancer cells.
“If drug developers wanted to target a cancer cell, they could activate caspases to carry out their normal cell-killing function,” he explains.
“But first we need to isolate the caspases of cancer cells and not alter their activity in normal cells. The question is, how can we target tumor cell activity without harming its healthy neighbours? ”
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The vital importance of caspase enzymes makes them essential for complex life.
That makes them highly conserved over time, as the wrong mutations result in a cell becoming unviable.
Ancestral caspase enzymes have evolved into a group of 12 in humans that perform various and varied functions.
The 650-million-year-old ancestor that Clark’s team worked to recreate will evolve into floors 3, 6, and 7.
They are thought to induce apoptosis by destroying structural and repair proteins in the cell.
However, Earth was a very different place 650 million years ago.
Multicellular life does not yet exist.
The Cambrian explosion, where complex plants and animals began to develop, occurred about 541 million years ago.
Source: | This article first appeared on Express.co.uk
