Understanding how our cells repair damaged DNA, a breakthrough which earned the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday, could make cancer treatment more effective, experts say.
By revealing how our cells automatically fix DNA mutations which can lead to illness, the discovery opened the door to significantly improving chemotherapy s effectiveness against cancer, which kills some eight million people worldwide each year.
“You can use this knowledge to destroy cancer,” said Nora Goosen, a DNA repair expert at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Chemotherapy attacks cancer cells by trying to scramble their genetic code and thus their ability to multiply, but cancer cells, just like healthy ones, do not give up without a fight.
“The cell repair systems are going to try to undo the work of doctors by fixing the damage the doctors were trying to inflict,” said Terence Strick, a DNA repair researcher at the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris.
One solution would be to inhibit the ability of cancerous cells to self-mend.
“If you attack these repair mechanisms (in cancer cells) in combination with chemotherapy and other drugs…, it (treatment) can be more effective,” Goosen said.
Sweden s Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich of the United States and Aziz Sancar, a Turkish-American, were awarded the top chemistry award for unravelling the process by which our cells repair mutations caused to DNA by the Sun or carcinogenic substances found in alcohol and cigarettes, for example.
