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Article: Turning P53 On, Off Could Avoid Radiation's Damage.
- Article from:
- BIOWORLD Today
- Article date:
- November 3, 2009
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 A Thomson Healthcare Company. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Science Editor
One of the ironies of cancer is that patients generally feel worse after treatment than before; radiation and chemotherapy induce widespread cell death, by activating the DNA damage response via p53.
P53's claim to fame is that it is a tumor suppressor, and so conventional wisdom holds that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs: Chemotherapy's and radiation's side effects are "generally deemed an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the role p53 has in tumor suppression," a research team from the University of California at San Francisco wrote in the Sept. 7, 2006, issue of Nature.
But in its paper, the team ...