Researchers at Johns Hopkins and Ohio State University have found that the number of copies of a particular gene can affect the severity of colon cancer in a mouse model. Publishing in the Jan. 3 issue of Nature, the research team describes how trisomy 21, or Down syndrome in humans, can repress tumor growth.“We took a new approach to a 50-year-old debate about whether people with Down syndrome develop cancer less often than other people,” says Roger H. Reeves, Ph.D., professor of physiology in the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Hopkins. “Studying the genetic differences associated with Down syndrome has revealed a new way of thinking about repressing cancer growth in everyone.”
