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New York, March 13
Cancer cells can avoid chemotherapy by entering a state that resembles certain types of senescence, a type of “active hibernation” that allows them to withstand the stress of aggressive treatments aimed at destroying them, suggests a new study.
The results, published in the journal Cancer Discovery, indicated that this biological process could help explain why cancers so often come back after treatment.
“Acute myeloid leukemia can be put into remission with chemotherapy, but it almost always comes back, and when it does, it’s incurable,” said lead author Ari M. Melnick of Weill Cornell Medicine.
The research was conducted on both organoids and mouse models from patient samples of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) tumors.
In the study, the researchers found that when AML cells were exposed to chemotherapy, a subset of cells went into a state of hibernation, or senescence, while at the same time assuming a condition that closely resembled a inflammation.
They looked like cells that have been injured and have to promote wound healing – shutting down the majority of their functions while recruiting immune cells to heal them.
Further research revealed that this inflammatory senescent state was induced by a protein called ATR, suggesting that blocking ATR may be a way to prevent cancer cells from adopting this condition.
The researchers tested this hypothesis in the laboratory and confirmed that giving an ATR inhibitor to leukemia cells before chemotherapy prevented them from going into senescence, thus allowing the chemotherapy to kill all cells.
IANS
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