DNA Key to Stop Cancer

From an article By JOHN COOK
P-I REPORTER

This article is significant because it shows that researchers may soon develop a way to prevent the spread of cancer.Recodagen was founded by J. Suzanne Lindsey, a former professor in the department of pharmaceutical sciences at WSU. It is among dozens of startup companies attempting to develop new cancer treatments.“There’s a lot of adverse side effects with current therapies and we wanted to be able to target the tumor cells specifically,” said Lindsey, who prior to WSU was an assistant professor at Texas Tech. Recodagen has discovered a protein that may stop the spread of cancer by targeting the invasive properties of cancer. Named MIG-7 for migration inducting gene. Accelerator, the Seattle business incubator for life science companies, has helped bankroll ideas from CalTech, Iowa State and the University of Washington.Now, it is announcing an investment in Recodagen Corp., a cancer research startup spun out of Washington State University. Carl Weissman, president of Accelerator, a Seattle based incubator for biotec companies that spun off the new bio-research company Recodagen, stated that “Cancer cells are only lethal when they invade and cause the tumor to become malignant”, “This gene is what causes cancer cells to become invasive, so if you block the protein that this gene expresses, then you can stop the cancer from becoming invasive. Therefore it does not metastasize and you don’t get the spread all over the body.”At this point, Recodagen is three to four years away from putting a drug into clinical trials.