Putting tumors on pause
Precancerous breast cells don’t degenerate into full-blown cancer when production of a certain protein is blocked, new research on mice shows.
The protein, called focal adhesion kinase (FAK), could offer a new target for developing drugs that would prevent benign breast tumors from becoming malignant, the researchers say.
FAK allows a cell to “know” about its surroundings by relaying signals from the cell’s outer membrane. “It’s telling the cell whether it’s in a normal environment,” explains William J. Muller of McGill University in Montreal. A cell’s context within a tissue is part of what determines its behavior, so the signals transmitted by FAK are important for making the cell behave normally.