Laboratory studies do not often go as planned, and while this is usually a source of endless frustration amongst scientists, some wonderful discoveries have been made by accident in the past, such as the pacemaker and penicillin. Now, researchers may have happened upon something that could turn out to be a powerful agent against a particularly aggressive type of cancer.
After endeavoring to find ways to prevent cancerous cells from dying during experiments, scientists from Stanford have discovered that it is possible to force leukemia cells to mature into a type of immune cell that, ironically, may help the body clear up other tumor cells. The study has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) is a rapidly-progressing cancer of the immature cells that differentiate into white blood cells, or lymphocytes. There are several different types of ALL, which are classified based on the type of lymphocyte (B cell or T cell) the cancer originates from, and how mature these cells are.
For the current study, scientists were investigating the most common type of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, known as as precursor B cell ALL, or B-ALL. As the name suggests, this cancer originates from a rogue B cell that became stuck at an early stage of maturation. These immature cells are unable to fully differentiate into normal B cells, partly because they lost some cellular molecules, known as transcription factors, which are required for their development. Transcription factors are proteins that stick to bits of DNA and then switch certain genes on or off.
B-ALL is a particularly aggressive cancer with a poor prognosis, so scientists from Stanford were keen to learn more about it with the hope of finding ways to tackle it, but they were struggling to keep cells isolated from a patient alive in the lab. “We were throwing everything at them to help them survive,” lead researcher Ravi Majeti said in a news release.
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