Repairing DNA damage: Researchers discover critical process in cancer...(Chemotherapy implications The goal o...)

The goal of conventional chemotherapy is to kill tumour cells leaving normal cells relatively unaffected by damaging their DNA. As such, in what may seem paradoxical, many chemotherapeutic drugs which are used to cure cancer are themselves powerful carcinogens that can also cause cancer.

"As shown in the current study, a non-functional ATR pathway resulting in limited DNA repair may be characteristic of many tumour cell types, but not of normal noncancerous cells. Determining if the NER system is working in patient tumours may therefore be an important first step to chemotherapy prescribing practices," says Yannick Auclair, the study's lead author and a PhD student at the Universit de Montral.

Any tumours identified as defective in ATR-mediated repair are expected to respond extremely well to chemotherapy, because the cells in these tumours would be extremely hypersensitive to certain anti-cancer drugs unlike normal cells in the rest of the body.

"These findings open a whole new area of research," says Dr. Drobetsky. "Our data harbour critical implications not only for understanding how cancer develops but also for devising new strategies to greatly improve cancer treatment."

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