Genes make potential target in lymph cancer
By Nathan Seppa
Treatment of the lymph node cancer called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is all-or-nothing. Chemotherapy cures about 40 percent of patients, but the others eventually die from this cancer. Because of that split, scientists deduce that the cancer cells–although outwardly similar–must vary from patient to patient.
The lymphoma arises in immune cells that reside in lymph nodes, and it causes tumors there. In the January Nature Medicine, researchers report that a gene called NOR1 is highly active in the diffuse large B-cell lymphoma tumors of people for whom chemotherapy has succeeded. But this gene is less active in patients for whom the drugs failed. NOR1 encodes a protein that plays a role in the normal self-destruction, or apoptosis, of damaged cells.