Damages in DNA can cause cells to malfunction, age prematurely, and become cancerous. The majority of changes to our DNA are immediately corrected.
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Nora Goosen, a DNA repair expert at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said, "If you attack these repair mechanisms (in cancer cells) in combination with chemotherapy and other drugs, it can be more effective."
Damages in DNA can cause cells to malfunction, age prematurely, and become cancerous. The majority of changes to our DNA are immediately corrected, but some might accumulate and lead to cancer. Some individuals are more susceptible to cancer because their DNA repair response is faulty.
Ironically, the same repair mechanism identified by the research team can also cause cancerous cell to resist the effects of cancer treatment.
Alan Worsley, a spokesman for the charity Cancer Research UK, said, "New drugs are being developed to fight the disease. The treatment olaparib, which stops cancer cells from fixing DNA damage was approved by the European Commission in December 2014 for use in Europe."
Alain Sarasin of France's CNRS research institute said, "We don't yet know how to target tumor cells specifically. If we would give a patient a molecule which inhibits the self-repair mechanism of cancer cells, it may also inhibit the repair systems of other cells like white blood cells. If, one day, we have a molecule which reinforces the DNA repair and can be targeted to blood cells, for example, followed by chemotherapy after, this would allow us to increase the chemotherapy dosage without unintentionally killing blood cells. For now, we don't know how to do that."
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