Among cancers, scientists have spent their entire research careers looking for cellular similarities that may lead to a single cure for many cancers -- the rare chance to have a single answer to a multifaceted problem. In 1997, scientists discovered a gene that they believed was the key to cellular immortality. Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase, or TERT, is a catalytic piece of telomerase, and while cellular immortality sounds like a good idea, it is actually how cancerous tumors grow and proliferate in cancer patients.

 

In the late nineties, the unanswered question was whether or not TERT was a cancer-causing gene. Scientists spent the next decade hunting for the mutations that activate it but no one was able to find mutations in TERT. Two years ago, two groups of researchers discovered that TERT didn't have any mutations at all. Instead, the mutations were occurring in the regulatory region that controls the expression of the gene. These mutations showed up in melanoma, and in many cancers found in the brain, liver and bladder.

 

"It was at that point that I realized we had all the tools and expertise in our lab to understand the mechanisms of these mutations. What my lab did with our collaborators at CU's Anschutz Medical Campus was to trace the effect of the mutation from the DNA to the increased RNA levels, to the increased protein levels, to the increased telomerase levels," says BioFrontiers Director Tom Cech, who recently published his team's findings in the journal, Science. "We were able to show this effect in 23 bladder cancer cell lines by comparing those with mutations to those without mutations." Read more

BioFrontiers' Aaron Clauset, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, was recently awarded the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. He joins six other winners this year at CU-Boulder, all from the College of Engineering and Applied Science.