Discovery of pro-metastasis protein reveals mysterious link to neurodegeneration — ScienceDaily

In work published earlier this month in Nature, they identify a protein that appears to act as a "master regulator" by blocking tumor suppressor genes and so helping to set metastasis in motion. "Although the research is in its very early days, if we learn more about how this process works, we may in the future be able to generate drugs that block the triggering of metastatic disease," says Sohail Tavazoie, senior author on the study, Leon Hess Assistant Professor, and head of the Elizabeth and Vincent Meyer Laboratory of Systems Cancer Biology. To pinpoint this protein, Tavazoie and his colleagues used a computer algorithm previously developed by first author Hani Goodarzi and co-author Saeed Tavazoie, a professor at Columbia University, to scan both the sequence and shape of RNA molecules in breast cancer cells. Only recently have cancer researchers begun to systematically look at the shapes of messenger RNA molecules, which encode instructions from DNA. ...