North American researchers have identified drugs that showed promising perspectives in treating cancers, according to a recent study published in Cancer Research. These drugs are normally used to treat other diseases, such as heart failure, cardiac arrhythmia, and infections. "We identified a dozen or so drugs that reactivate tumour suppressor genes through an epigenetic mechanism that was never observed before", said Noël Raynal, MSc, PhD, who is an investigator at the mother-child research hospital CHU Sainte-Justine. "Epigenetic mechanisms control gene expression. They are highly deregulated in cancer cells. The mechanism that we discovered controls gene expression by targeting intracellular calcium levels," he explains.
↧