CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--MIT scientists wielding molecular scissors have shown for the first time that the sugar jackets of cancer cells can be tailored to inhibit tumors. The work, which could lead to drugs that attack cancer cells in a very specific manner, will be reported in the January 22, 2002 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The web of material that surrounds every cell, known as the extracellular matrix, is critical to cell function, orchestrating how signals from outside the cell are processed and perceived by it. The key components of that web are complex sugars and proteins.
Scientists have made substantial progress in understanding web proteins and their roles, leading to exciting new drugs like the anti-cancer endostatin, but insights into the sugars have lagged. Thats because the sugars are more complex and have many more building blocks than DNA or proteins, making them more difficult to study. New tools developed at MIT, however, are changing that.
Accompanying the MIT paper is a commentary by Professor Ajit Varki of the University of California, San Diego, titled "Six Blind Men and the Elephant - the Many Faces of Heparan Sulfates." Heparan sulfates are the sugars found in cell jackets.
SUGARS AND CANCER
In the current work MIT scientists led by Associate Professor Ram Sasisekharan of the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Health (BEH) used the new tools to probe the relationship between changes in tumor cells sugar jackets and cancer. Were the sugars associated with different stages of cancer directly responsible for tumor growth, or simply byproducts?
To find out, Sasisekharan and colleagues isolated two distinct sets of these sugars via molecular scissors, or enzymes, that clip the cells sugar jacket in different places, resulting in different sugar fragments. The enzyme heparinase I [hep I] created the first kind of sugar; heparinase III [hep III] the seco
'"/>
Contact: Elizabeth Thomson
thomson@mit.edu
617-258-5402
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
21-Jan-2002