Chromosome-Hoarding Ovarian Cancer Cells May Help Treatment
Using new CRISPR tools, researchers learn extra chromosomes promote tumor growth and paradoxically may help some treatments work.
The Challenge
The human body is a complex organism made up of trillions of living cells that continuously duplicate and divide to help the body grow and develop. When a normal cell divides as it should, chromosomes copy themselves and separate symmetrically into two new cells. Most cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes, which are made up of DNA, carrying genes that are?tightly coiled around proteins. A cell with 23 pairs of chromosomes is called diploid.
When cancer cells divide, though, most new cells end up with extra numbers of whole chromosomes or parts of chromosomes. These cells are called aneuploids.?
About 90% of tumors and 75% of blood cancers are aneuploid. It’s rare for normal cells to have extra chromosomes.
Scientists have known for more than 100 years that these extra chromosomes exist, but questions remain about how aneuploidy helps tumors survive.?
Does aneuploidy cause cancer to develop and grow, or does cancer cause aneuploidy??
Can we successfully treat cancer with certain drugs by destroying aneuploid cells?
More research is needed to answer these questions to help scientists better understand the relationship between aneuploidy and cancer and its potential to affect a patient’s response to cancer treatment.?
A key challenge has been that gene editing tools have been limited to manipulating only a single gene when aneuploidy affects 100s of genes at the same time.?
The long, stringy DNA that makes up genes is spooled within chromosomes inside the nucleus of a cell.
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The Research
绿帽社 (ACS) Research Scholar Jason M. Sheltzer, PhD, leads a team of scientists at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut who are shedding light on why cancers become aneuploid, how these extra chromosomes affect tumors’ growth and spread, and how aneuploidy might be used to develop new cancer treatments.
Sheltzer recently published an article in? about his team’s investigations of aneuploid cells using their new CRISPR gene editing tool. They studied aneuploidy in ovarian, melanoma, and gastric cancer cell lines, comparing cells with and without extra chromosomes.
“Scientists have had little success in determining whether cancer cells are fueled by abnormal chromosomes,” says Sheltzer.?