HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM, AUDREY LASRY AND GENOME BIOL, 17:145, 2016
EDITOR'S CHOICE IN CELL & MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
The paper
D. Aran et al., “Widespread parainflammation in human cancer,” Genome Biol, 17:145, 2016.
Smoldering threat
Researchers in Israel were trying to understand why a particular mouse model was so unusually cancer-prone once it suffered a mutation in the tumor suppressor gene p53. They noticed that the animal’s epithelial tissue showed signs of low-grade inflammation, undetectable by normal hallmarks such as white blood cell recruitment. Intriguingly, treating the mutated mouse with a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) reduced its risk of cancer—an effect observed in some human studies as well.
Smoke signals
To explore what was driving this so-called parainflammation (PI), the team recently collaborated with Dvir Aran of...