The Centre Daily Times reports on two Penn State scientists, Robert Paulson and K. Sandeep Prabhu, who are studying a possible leukemia treatment, and perhaps a cure.
Chemotherapy drugs are essentially poisons that kill leukemia cells, along with healthy cells. But the leukemia stem cells can evade the chemotherapy treatment.
"So they just hide," Paulson said. "And so people will go into remission as long as they’re on the drug. But as soon as they go off the drug then those stem cells just rev up again."
But D12-PGJ3 activates a tumor suppresser gene, known as p53, inside leukemia stem cells -- and that activation causes the leukemia cells to die.
"What we’re trying to do is to selectively make these stem cells, the cancer stem cells, undergo a suicidal death," Prabhu said.
Original source: Centre Daily Times
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