SIMMER DOWN: A mouse adenoma organoid treated with an NSAID (right) has less parainflammation (orange marker; control on the left). HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM, AUDREY LASRY AND GENOME BIOL, 17:145, 2016
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 the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues to identify its genetic signature, and found an ...
