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Cancer Resistant Mouse Provides Possible Cure
Evoluder writes to tell us that scientists at Wake Forest University have found a "cancer resistant mouse" and bred it to make a small army of cancer resistant mice. When transplanting blood from one of these mice to a normal non-resistant mouse they are able to provide "lifetime cancer protection". From the article: "The cancer-resistant mice all stem from a single mouse discovered in 1999. "The cancer resistance trait so far has been passed to more than 2,000 descendants in 14 generations," said Cui, associate professor of pathology. It also has been bred into three additional mouse strains. About 40 percent of each generation inherits the protection from cancer."
See PNAS, vol. 103, no 20, p7753-7758. VERY interesting work.
It's all in the title of the article... The white blood cells "recognize specific patterns on the cancer cell surface", and flag/attack them as they would any other foreign body. Biology wasn't my strong-suit either, but I would venture a guess that by knowing what sort of mechanism would lead to the white blood cells identifying cancerous/precancerous cells as a risk, the response could be adapted to work similarly (if not identically) in humans. Cancer is not a by-product of evolution, it is a result of malfunctioning cells which replicate uncontrollably. This is generally not a product of 'evolution' as you and I would think of it, but by some sort of damage to the cell which caused it to malfunction. It isn't so much a "death trigger" as replicating without purpose; when you no longer need skin cells at a certain location, and some mutated cell keeps replicating malfunctioning cells, you've got cancer. If your immune system cannot recognize something as a threat, it cannot respond to it, which appears to be the current predicament with cancer in humans.
"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two different ways to do this.
The first is by expression profiling- looking at difference in gene expression. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_chip This will actually give you a readout of how the two cells are different in terms of how they use different genes to express their differences.
The other is positional cloning. You basically breed a resistant mouse with a non-resistant mouse to get an F1 intercross. If you are dealing with inbred mice, these are genetically identical but each chromosome is different- one from mom and one from dad. You breed this generation with eachother to get an F2 intercross and then phenotype the offspring (are they resistant to cancer?) and then genotype them (what are their genetic differences?). Genes undergo semi-random reassortment through cross-over events and all offspring in the F2 incross have a random sprinkling of genes from mom and dad. You then do linkage analysis to find out which genetic differences are most closely linked to the phenotype you are looking for.