MIT sheds light on how tumor cells form

Could lead to new therapies

CL, Mass.--MIT cancer researchers have discovered a process that may explain how some tumor cells form, a discovery that could one day lead to new therapies that prevent defective cells from growing and spreading.

The work was reported June 8 in the advance online issue of The EMBO Journal, a publication of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).






"The checkpoint proteins are like referees in a tug-of-war contest," said Viji Draviam, a research scientist in MIT's Department of Biology and lead author of the paper. "They make sure that all chromosomes are lined up in the right places before the cell is allowed to divide."


"It's puzzling that the suspected culprits - the aneuploidy-inducing checkpoint mutations - are rarely found at the scene of the crime, in the aneuploid tumors," Draviam said.

That lingering question prompted Draviam and her colleagues to study how two other key molecules - a known tumor suppressor protein called APC and its partner protein EB1 - work together to assure that cells divide normally.


"This is important because it is the first demonstration that interrupting the normal function of these proteins will cause the cell to become aneuploid," Draviam said. "Our research sheds light on what could go wrong to cause an irregular number of chromosomes in cells even when the checkpoint proteins appear to be functioning properly."


Draviam's co-authors are graduate students Irina Shapiro and Bree Aldridge and MIT Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering Peter Sorger.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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