Thaindian News

Washington, March 26 (ANI): Scientists at UCLA have developed a “roadmap” of the complex signalling processes involved in cancer that could lead to new methods for diagnosing and overcoming drug resistance to the disease.

Cancer is a complicated mix of multiple, interconnected events gone awry through mutations. And while scientists have learned much about these individual events, they have long sought a better understanding of how events function together, as a system, to cause malignancies.

Proteins function as the main components of the physiological metabolic and signaling pathways of cells. Using proteomics - the large-scale study of protein interactions and activities - the UCLA team developed an approach for sorting out the complexity of events that gives rise to malignancies.

The team demonstrated the use of network-scale proteomic experiments and mathematical analyses to build a “system-wide” view of how signaling mutations cause leukemia and to identify points of susceptibility that can be targeted by “cocktail” therapies to prevent drug resistance.

In their work, the UCLA team uses state-of-the-art technologies that concurrently measure hundreds of signaling events within cancer cells.

These new approaches for sorting out the complexities of cancer cells involve building a wiring diagram of the interconnections or “crosstalk” in cancer cells that will help scientists overcome drug resistances.

Lead author Thomas Graeber likens the goal to creating a better roadmap by identifying the bypass routes used by cancer cells to escape the inhibition caused by the drugs.

“We have the tourist information, but we need to discover the insider knowledge of the taxi driver to know how the cell gets around traffic jams rather than getting stuck in the traffic jam,” he said.

The study was published on March 29 in the journal Science Signaling. (ANI)