Radiation inflicts extensive damage on cells’ DNA. For many cells, the damage is too complex to repair, and the cells die–making radiotherapy a frontline cancer treatment. However, some tumor cells are resistant to radiation: They repair the inflicted damage and survive. New research, published today in Science, finds that tumor cells buy themselves time for these repairs by self-inflicting smaller, easier-to-repair damage to their DNA, widening the window in which they can repair the more extensive radiation-inflicted damage.
The study “presents an intriguing and essentially unanticipated finding that tumor cells have the capacity to promote a ‘secondary wave of strand breaks’ in response to stress such as ionizing radiation,” David Gewirtz, a pharmacologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist in an email. Members of his own laboratory had also observed such breaks, he writes, but were unable to determine their origin. “The ...
