Prostate Cancer And DNA Mutation: New Connections Revealed

Specific mutations in the DNA of men with metastatic prostate cancer have been shown to play a larger role in the disease than previously thought. Researchers hope that this finding will help change standard therapy guidelines and open the door to drugs currently being used for other cancers.

The new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, examined inherited mutations in DNA repair genes.

These gene mutations were already known to occur more frequently in prostate cancer patients than the general population.

However, the present study demonstrated that mutations in DNA repair genes were even more prevalent in people with metastatic prostate cancer, specifically.

Read more: Prostate Cancer And DNA Mutation: New Connections Revealed

Gene mutation research gives a new perspective on prostate cancer.

Source: medicalnewstoday

Recent Progress in Genome Editing

Researchers develop a CRISPR-based technique that efficiently corrects point mutations without cleaving DNA.

Most genetic diseases in humans are caused by point mutations—single base errors in the DNA sequence. However, current genome-editing methods cannot efficiently correct these mutations in cells, and often cause random nucleotide insertions or deletions (indels) as a byproduct. Now, researchers at Harvard University have modified CRISPR/Cas9 technology to get around these problems, creating a new “base editor,” described today (April 20) in Nature, which permanently and efficiently converts cytosine (C) to uracil (U) bases with low error in human and mouse cell lines.

“There are a lot of genetic diseases where you would want, in essence, to swap bases in and out,” said Jacob Corn, scientific director of the Innovative Genomics Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research. “Trying to get this to work is one of the big challenges in the field, and I think this is a really exciting approach.”

Read more: Recent Progress in Genome Editing

Illustration of DNA ligase, one of the cell proteins involved in repairing double-strand breaks in
DNAWIKIMEDIA; WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE IN ST. LOUIS

Source: wikimedia