New view of leukemia cells identifies best treatment options, Stanford resea...( cellular expressions Nolan watches are...)

cellular expressions Nolan watches are message-carrying pathways that translate a signal in the environment into action in the cell's nucleus. In all cells, a carefully orchestrated network of molecules passes messages between the cell's surface and the nucleus. Molecules that relay those messages follow a strict order in healthy cells, always handing the note - in this case, a phosphate atom - to the next molecule in line.

In cancerous cells, those highly regulated note-passing brigades grow independent. Molecules hand notes to the wrong counterpart, and sometimes write a note of their own and pass it along. A signal at the cell's surface saying "stop dividing" may get handed to a neighboring pathway where it becomes a signal to divide rapidly - a hallmark of cancer cells - or may get destroyed altogether.

These disturbances aren't visible just by looking at a tumor sample. Nolan got his first glimpse inside the cell's machinery using a technique developed by postdoctoral scholar Omar Perez, PhD. He harnessed a decades-old device called flow cytometry to act as a hidden security camera monitoring the note-passing molecules. The data is a snapshot of which molecules have a phosphate note in hand and which don't in response to normal signals that a cell would encounter.

Postdoctoral scholar and first author on the paper Jonathan Irish, PhD, applied Perez' technique to samples from healthy people, people with AML who responded to chemotherapy and people whose AML did not respond to the initial chemotherapy attempt. He monitored six of the molecular handoffs to see which differed when the cells were exposed to five different signals they would normally encounter in the body.

What he found was striking. Doctors usually treat a cancer as a single, uniform entity. When they take a sample to determine how far the cancer has progressed, the entire cancer gets graded on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being the most s
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22-Jul-2004

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