Russian biologists have noticed that cancer is associated with incorrect “repair” of the genome

The emergence of tumor cells may be associated not with the lack of “repair” of the genome, but with its low quality. This is reported by TASS with reference to the press service of the Moscow Phystech (MIPT).

For a long time, scientists believed that cancer was caused by a loss of the body’s ability to repair DNA errors. It was believed that this leads to the uncontrolled division of cancer bodies, which accumulate more and more mutations.

Russian biologists have found signs that this view may be wrong. To do this, they studied the course of DNA repair in nine of the most common cancers, including breast, lung, kidney, stomach, thyroid and pancreas. The analysis carried out by the researchers showed that most types of tumors were characterized not by suppressed, but by increased work of most DNA repair systems. As a result, tumor cells actively corrected the errors that occurred during their division and vital activity, which contradicts the established ideas about the behavior of cancer bodies.

At the same time, the study pointed to a possible other cause of cancer – it is very likely that along with an increase in DNA repair activity, its quality decreases. In cancer cells, the G2/M system was suppressed, which plays the role of a control mechanism that monitors the correctness of the corrections made to the DNA structure as a result of restoring the integrity of its strands and forces the cell to stop dividing in the presence of serious errors in the genome structure.

Without this control mechanism, tumor cells divide faster and accumulate mutations faster. The authors of the study hope that their findings can be used to create a new type of anti-cancer therapy that would reactivate G2/M.