 William Stetler-Stevenson |
One particular family of enzymes, called matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), may hold much of the key to such a weapon. When first studied in the 1940s, matrix degradation was actually more important to the leather industry than it was to the biomedical industry. Because proteases seemed to affect the integrity of leather, they were studied at several leather institutes around the world. Only with the explanation of this useful quality in the early 1960s did what came to be called MMPs get introduced to developmental and molecular biology. Amphibian experiments showed that MMPs digest collagens, a major component of skin (leather is essentially tanned skin).
In fact, MMPs actually degrade several ...
