Wei Zhang: P21 and cancer
Wei Zhang, Director of Center for Cancer Genomics and Precision Oncology at Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center, shared on LinkedIn:
“We first published the association of p21 with chemo resistance in acute myeloid leukemia in 1995. Then we showed that p21 is commonly abundantly expressed in glioma. In this paper in 1998, we showed in cell based assays that p21 increased DNA damage repair and rendered glioblastoma cells resistant to DNA damaging chemotherapy agents. In a follow up paper published in Clinical Cancer Research, we showed that knockdown of p21 sensitized glioblastoma cells to these chemotherapy agents.
Here was when I became tormented. It was the so-what question I couldn’t address. Since p21 is a cell cycle blocker, a strategy to decrease p21 to make the tumor grow more, even when they became more chemotherapy sensitive, did not seem to be a logical or practical approach. It’s interesting that there are ongoing research out there on the mechanisms of p21 in DNA repair. There are still studies on p21 in chemotherapy resistance in various cancers. Hope the investigators can address the so what question. For some cancers, a controlled increase in tumor growth to prime therapy response may work but not space constrained brain tumors.”
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Source: Wei Zhang/LinkedIn
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