Working with human breast and lung cells, Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have charted a molecular pathway that can lure cells down a hazardous path of duplicating their genome too many times, a hallmark of cancer cells.
The findings reveal what goes wrong when a group of molecules and kinases are triggered to regulate the cell cycle, resulting in replication of chromosomes in cells that exit the cell cycle. The findings, the team suggest, could be used to develop therapies that interrupt these abnormal events in the cell cycle, and have the potential to stop the growth of cancers.