By i24news

 

A new study by Israeli researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology’s cancer research center could prove to be “most significant” in controlling the growth of cancer cells, Israeli media reported on Sunday.

Scientists will sequence the genetic codes of about 75,000 patients with cancer and rare diseases – Photo: Leon Neal/AFP/File

A team of Israeli researchers at the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, headed by Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, an Israeli Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, and led by Dr. Yelena Kravtsova-Ivantsiv, has discovered two proteins that can suppress cancer and control the cells’ growth and development.

The team included research students and physicians from the Rambam, Carmel and Hadassah Medical Centers.

In a paper published last week in the journal CELL, the researchers showed how the proteins, which were unknown until now, could repress cancerous tissues and explained how a high concentration of a protein called KPC1 and another called p50 in the tissue can protect it from cancerous tumors.

The research also detailed how the ubiquitin process — a cell system responsible for breaking down damaged proteins that can harm cells and tissues and co-discovered by Ciechanover, for which he won the Nobel — has a role in the mechanism.

Ciechanover, who is also the president of the Israel Cancer Society, stressed on Sunday that “many more years are required to establish the research and gain a solid understanding of the mechanisms behind the suppression of the tumors. The development of a drug based on this discovery is a possibility, although not a certainty, and the road to such a drug is long and far from simple.”

 

View original i24news publication at: http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/technology/67516-150413-researchers-headed-by-israeli-nobel-prize-winner-make-cancer-breakthrough