Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center, have identified a new mechanism that appears to suppress tumor growth, opening the possibility of developing a new class of anti-cancer drugs.
Writing in this week's online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Willis X. Li, PhD, a professor in the Department of Medicine at UC San Diego, reports that a particular form of a signaling protein called STAT5A stabilizes the formation of heterochromatin (a form of chromosomal DNA), which in turn suppresses the ability of cancer cells to issue instructions to multiply and grow.
Co-authors are Xiaoyu Hu, Amy Tsurumi and Hartmut Land, Department of Biomedical Genetics, University of Rochester Medical Center; Pranabananda Dutta, Jinghong Li and Jingtong Wang, Department of Medicine, UCSD.