Last month, I wrote about how medicine had finally been able to actually cure a man of HIV. Although medical research is typically the job of people who work in the Healthcare field, other scientist have recently been collaborating with medical experts to bring new ideas to the table. Now, it looks as though researchers in the fields of cosmology and astrobiology have made a new breakthrough in cancer research.
Paul Davies, the director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University and Charles Lineweaver, from the Australian National University have worked together to publish a new cancer research theory in the journal Physical Biology.
Although they aren't primarily medical researchers, they had the idea to step back and take a larger look at the big picture in an attempt to trace the origins of cancer. Their thought is that finding out where it came from and how it started would be a way to find new approaches to treatment and prevention.
The astrobiologists, working alongside American oncologists, are suggesting that on a molecular basis, cancer resembles ancient forms of life. By looking at the type of multicellular lifeforms that flourished 600 million years ago, they are trying to find ways to help the oncologists discover new ways to approach cancer research. The problem with the disease is that the cancer cells themselves are very difficult to eradicate completely and are constantly changing and coming up with new defenses.
According to their paper, the scientist suggest that the genes that control the behavior of these types of organisims are still inside our own bodies, it's just that we have developed more recent genes that keep them from growing unchecked. The researchers speculate that cancer cells emerge when our newer regulatory genes become damaged or mutated.
If their theory is right, it would help explain why cancer cells are so quickly able to defend themselves against attacks by chemotherapy. In the paper, Lineweaver said:
"The number of genes that can cause cancer are limited. They have evolved very early, and they're very sophisticated. They're very good at surviving. It's no mystery that cancer knows when it's attacked by a chemical, and that it knows how to get rid of it.
"How does it know how to do that? Because we knew how to do that a billion years ago. And the cells have essentially reverted to an earlier stage of only partially differentiated life forms."
The researchers hope that their theory will be able to help oncologist unravel the origins of cancer and will be able to come up with better ways to combat it. The problem is that cancer is sort of a “moving target” in regards to treatment because it appears to be continually changing. This breakthrough will open doors to changing the treatment protocols and researching ways to strengthen the natural suppression mechanisms we all have that keep these genes from becoming active. By changing the focus of their research from finding newer, more aggressive ways to directly attack the cancer cells themselves to ways to boost the bodies natural suppression, oncologists may be able to find a way to treat cancer and cure patients of the disease completely.
Sources:
LifeScientist
By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for Healthcarejobsiteblog, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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