Inducing eye-tumor cells to self-destruct
By Nathan Seppa
From Washington, D.C., at a seminar on Research to Prevent Blindness
When their usefulness has ended, most cells succumb to a natural process of programmed cell death called apoptosis. The cells break up and their constituents are recycled.
In contrast, tumor cells don’t know when to die, thereby exacerbating the uncontrolled growth of malignancies. By reawakening the apoptosis that seems to fail in many tumor cells, J. William Harbour, an ophthalmologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and his colleagues have now found a way to stop the progress of two eye cancers in cell cultures and rabbits.