Cancer cells repopulation ability in vitro

PubMed, the Internet portal of biomedical and life sciences literature, indexed an interesting article, entitled “FANCD2 depletion sensitizes cancer cells repopulation ability in vitro.” (Cancer Lett. 2007 Jul 20). Authors are Lyakhovich A and Surralles J, from the Group of Mutagenesis, Department of Genetics and Microbiology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Centre for Biomedical Research on Rare Diseases (CIBERER), Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spain. Inactivation of Fanconi anemia/BRCA pathway in some cancers causes increased sensitivity to various drugs used for chemo-therapy. Several approaches have been suggested to artificially disrupt this pathway for better treatment. In their study, the authors have utilized RNA interference technique to knock-down the expression of FANCD2 and sensitize cancer cells undergoing treatment with DNA damaging agents. The authors could show that knocking-down FANCD2 gene expression increases sensitivity of cancer cells to mitomycin C and to less extent to gamma-rays. Importantly, this effect strongly correlates to repopulation ability of cancer cells and those cell lines with significant FANCD2 depletion revealed decreased recurrence capacity. To access the abstract of the article, click here.