Cancer cells are relentless, possessing the vexatious ability to develop resistance to current therapies and making the disease hugely challenging to treat. However, an exciting new study may have identified cancer's weak spot; the discovery has already led to the near-eradication of the disease in cell cultures.
The study - which was recently published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering - reveals how altering the structure of chromatin in cancer cells could make them easier to destroy.
In the cell nucleus, DNA is wrapped around proteins called histones. Together they form chromatin.
Chromatin's job is to package the genetic code neatly into the cell's nucleus. Chromatin can also regulate which genes are switched on and off. In cancer cells, however, chromatin helps them to evolve and adapt to cancer therapies, thereby allowing them to survive.
"If you think of genetics as hardware," explains study co-author Vadim Backman, of the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, "then chromatin is the software."
"Complex diseases such as cancer," he adds, "do not depend on the behavior of individual genes, but on the complex interplay among tens of thousands of genes."
So, Backman and his colleagues set their sights on chromatin as the key to combating cancer drug resistance, and an imaging technique they developed last year helped them to learn more about this intricate set of macromolecules.
Predicting cancer cell death with chromatin
The new technique is called Partial Wave Spectroscopic (PWS) microscopy, and it enables real-time monitoring of chromatin in living cells.
Additionally, the researchers explain that PWS allows them to assess chromatin at a length scale of 20–200 nanometers, which they say is the precise point at which cancer formation influences chromatin.
They used PWS to monitor chromatin in cultured cancer cells. They found that chromatin has a specific "packing density" associated with gene expression that helps cancer cells to evade treatments.