Researchers find new organelle that may help cancer patients – CBS19 News

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- Scientists looking for a way to help breast cancer patients have found a new organelle inside cells that may help.

Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine say the organelle works to prevent cancer by ensuring that genetic material is sorted correctly as cells divide and problems with this organelle have been connected to a subset of breast cancer tumors due to a lot of mistakes when segregating chromosomes.

According to a release, this analysis offers a new way for doctors to sort patient tumors as they choose the therapies that may be used to treat the patients.

The researchers hope these insights will help doctors to better personalize treatments to best benefit patients, potentially sparing up to 40 percent of breast cancer patients from treatment that will not be effective.

Some percentage of women get chemotherapy drugs for breast cancer that are not very effective. They are poisoned, in pain and their hair falls out, so if it isn't curing their disease, then that's tragic, said researcher P. Todd Stukenberg, PhD, of the UVA Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. One of our goals is to develop new tests to determine whether a patient will respond to a chemotherapeutic treatment, so they can find an effective treatment right away.

Stukenberg and his team of researchers ay the organelle they found is essential but ephemeral, as it only forms when needed to ensure chromosomes are sorted correctly. It then disappears when that task is complete.

Stukenberg also compares the organelle to a droplet of liquid that condenses within other liquid, saying the droplets act like mixing bowls that concentrate certain cellular ingredients to allow for biochemical reactions to occur in a specific location.

What's exciting is that cells have this new organelle and certain things will be recruited into it and other things will be excluded, he said. The cells enrich things inside the droplet and, all of a sudden, new biochemical reactions appear only in that location. It's amazing.

He says the organelle acts more like a gel that allows cellular components to come in and exit but it has binding sites that concentrate a small set of the cell's contents.

Our data suggests this concentration of proteins is really important, said Stukenberg. I can get complex biochemical reactions to occur inside a droplet that I've been failing to reconstitute in a test tube for years. This is the secret sauce I've been missing.

The release adds that researchers have known for about eight years that cells make droplets like this for other processes, but they did not know they are made on chromosomes during cell division.

Stukenberg thinks such droplets are common and more important than previously understood, saying the cells are using these non-membranous organelles to regulate much of their work.

The release says this discovery helps scientists better understand the process of mitosis, or cell division, and it sheds light on cancer and how it occurs.

The organelle's main function is to fix mistakes in tiny microtubules that pull apart chromosomes when cells are dividing. They ensure that each cell gets the correct genetic material.

However, in cancer cells, the repair process is defective, and the cancer cells can be driven to be more aggressive.

Stukenberg has also developed tests to measure the amount of chromosome mis-segregation in tumors, which he hopes will allow doctors to pick the proper treatment for patients.

His next step he says will be to examine the strange organelle's role in colorectal cancer.

The findings have been described in the scientific journal Nature Cell Biology.

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Researchers find new organelle that may help cancer patients - CBS19 News