Cancer > A New Target in Cancer Treatment

A New Target in Cancer Treatment

By Mayo Clinic Illustration by Joey Guidone

Mayo Clinic Researchers have discovered a key protein that could open the door to more precise cancer treatments.

The protein acts like a traffic controller inside cells, helping protect DNA — the body’s genetic blueprint — during cell division. Normally, cells must carefully copy and read DNA at the same time. When those processes collide, DNA damage can occur, increasing the risk of cancer.

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The newly identified protein, called KCTD10, helps prevent those dangerous collisions and keeps DNA stable. In laboratory studies, researchers found that when this protective protein is missing, cells experience much higher levels of DNA damage, which is a common feature of cancer.

For patients, that weakness could become an advantage. Cancer cells that lack this safeguard could be especially sensitive to treatments in which they are unable to repair DNA.

“We can take advantage of that and attack those cancer cells when they are most vulnerable, which opens a new therapeutic window for us to treat certain types of cancer,” says Zhenkun Lou, Ph.D., the Swanson/Schmucker Endowed Professor to Support Health and Cancer Research at Mayo Clinic and the senior author of the study.

Next steps in this research include identifying which cancers lack the KCTD10 protein and developing strategies to target them more effectively — a promising stride toward more precise and powerful cancer therapies

A version of this story was published on Mayo Clinic News Network.