"The general p53 was originally discovered in 1979 by Arnold Levine of Princeton University (now a member of HHMI's Scientific Review Board in Genetics), David Lane of the University of Dundee, Scotland (now an HHMI International Research Scholar), and William of Old the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. For a period of ten years, p53 was believed to be an oncogene, since the general that the scientists worked with happened to be a mutant. But in 1989, Bert Vogel Stein, Ray White (who was then an HHMI investigator at the University of Utah), and their colleagues Showed that p53 is actually a tumor suppressor, and that it is Altered in The majority of colon cancer. Since then, mutant forms of p53 have cropped up in so many tumor and aroused so much interest that Science hailed the p53 protein as the "Molecule of the Year" in 1993. "
from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1996 HHMI)
The reason I write this post (or this series) lies in a fascination I have which is that when all is said and done, we are composed of cells, which are all more or less identical, and they are all from the same one cell, but nevertheless expressed very different - and the complexity of the cellular interplay that takes place, and mechanisms of the intra-and extracellular processes. I would therefore like to collect substantial knowledge in this area.
Therefore I have chosen to explain the mitotic cell division. Below, I elaborate how a cell cycle regulated and control protein p53s role in a cell cycle. It will lead me into kontrolproteinets role in the development of cancer, and then I will conclude by assessing the development of new treatments for p53 and the role they play and will play later.
I would also start with thanks to Professor Matthias Stein Double from medical biotechnology center at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, since I have been in contact with him, and he has answered some questions. He is principal investigator and work, among other things also at the University of Göttingen. This contact felt I needed as many of the books, articles and publications I have found already some years old, and therefore not entirely updated in terms of recent research. The questions were mainly directed toward future possibilities for cancer therapy with p53.
"In the past decade, scientists have uncovered so many clues how cancer begins two-and, by inference, how it might be stopped-that, for the first time, an understanding of how to control this dreaded disease seems not just possible but almost within reach.
Many of the new clues have come from research on a topic that used to be considered quite arcane: the cell cycle, the sequence of biochemical events through Which a cell grows and divide into two daughter cells. How cells divide has intrigued biologists since the beginning of the century, but only recently have scientists fathomed the complexity of the process. As a result, it has become clear that the mechanisms controlling the cell cycle play central roles in both the development and the prevention of cancer. "
