by KYW’s Lynne Adkins
Scientists in Philadelphia are making progress in understanding a group of genes known to predict which cancer tumors will be aggressive and likely to spread.
Dr. Steven McMahon, an associate professor of Cancer Biology at the Jefferson Kimmel Cancer Center, says understanding genes can help scientists treat or cure the cancer. For three years his group has been studying one gene which is part of a sequence of 11 known to predict which tumors will be aggressive and spread quickly.
His group discovered that it was an enzyme and he says that's positive because cancer drugs targeting enzymes can be very effective:
“Within a few years we might have very specific drugs that attack the activity of this enzyme and turn it off in those forms of cancer that are highly aggressive and prone to re-lapse and metastasize.”
His research will now focus on the other parts of the 11-gene sequence, trying to understand how they work and how they can be attacked.
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