TELOMERASE: A STEP TOWARD A CURE FOR CANCER
Report #7232
Those of you who read the Mirkin Report know that 4 years ago, I reported that a cure for cancer is near. Exciting new research shows that scientists have just discovered the enzyme that causes most cancers and it has structural characteristics that are similar to the virus that causes AIDS.
In 1994, Calvin Harley at the Geron Corporation in Menlo Park, California reported that the enzyme, telomerase, may cause almost all cancers (1). Cancer is not caused by an overproduction of cells. Normal cells live only so long and then die. Cancer cells live forever and become so numerous that they invade other tissues. Cancer cells eventually invade and kill normal cells that are necessary for life and the victim dies. For example, if you have cancer of the kidney, the kidney cells can become so numerous that they invade and grow in your lungs. This prevents your lungs from processing oxygen and you smother to death. The kidney cancer cells could invade your bones and cause them to break.
Cells pass on their genetic material to newly formed cells through their chromosomes. You have brown hair because your mother or father gave you the gene on the chromosome for brown hair. Normal cells split to make two cells, but before they split, they duplicate each chromosome so they can send one chromosome to each new cell. However, normal human cells do not know how to duplicate the tips of chromosomes, so with each division, a chromosome loses a part of its end, called a telomere, until eventually it loses enough of the end to cause the chromosomes to stick to each other and die. Cancer cells produce an enzyme called telomerase that preserves the ends of chromosomes/ so with every splitting to form two new chromosomes, the chromosomes do not lose their ends and live forever (2,3). Studies show that finding telomerase in urine diagnoses bladder cancer (4,5), and telomerase in cervical smears diagnoses cervical cancer (6). To cure cancer, we have to destroy telomerase without destroying the cell (7), so cancer cells can die and a person infected with cancer can live.
Dr. Victoria Lundblad of Baylor University Medical School discovered the main protein enzyme that makes telomerase. The next step in a cure for cancer is to learn how to block the enzyme that makes telomerase. That's coming soon.
By Gabe Mirkin, M.D., for CBS Radio News
1) Calvin Harley April, 1994 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2) Jerry Shay. Science December 27, 1994. 3) Science two papers September 6, 1995. 4) bladder cancer: Markus Muller Freie University in Berlin at April 13, 1997 meeting of
hte American Urological Association. 5) bladder cancer: Journal of the National Cancer Institute May 21, 1997. 6) Cervical cancer: Cancer Research May 5, 1997. 7) AM Burger, MC Bibby, JA Double. Telomerase activity in normal and malignant mammalian
tissues: Feasibility of telomerase as a target for cancer chemotherapy. British Journal of
Cancer 75: 4 (1997):516-522.
Reported 9/30/97; Checked 9/5/05