Designing New Molecular Tools to Study the Life and Death of a Cancer Cell, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute Study

ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2011) — Basic and translational research on cancer, and development of new cancer therapeutics, has focused on different aspects of cancer cellular function. One area of focus is the life and death of a cancer cell. Apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death, is a fundamental process of cells including cancer cells. The signal transduction pathways of apoptosis involve many different proteins and their interactions with each other. Protein-protein interactions involved in these apoptotic signals, like those in many other biological processes, are often determined or influenced by a short fragment of protein sequence or even certain key amino acid residues with important functional or structural roles in the protein-protein interface. For biomedical and pharmaceutical scientists, developing new molecular tools to understand and control the functions of these small protein fragments or residues and the biological and pathological processes that they mediate is a task and challenge of both fundamental interest and practical value.