A researcher from the Institute for Health Research and Innovation (i3S) was part of a team that identified ageing mechanisms that help turn immune system cells into cancer cells, it was revealed on Saturday.
A statement from the University of Porto’s institute clarified that researcher José Pedro Castro was part of a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School that uncovered the mechanisms of aging that lead to the development of B-cell lymphomas.
The study, published in the journal Nature Aging, “opens the door to new strategies for pharmacological prevention.”
By comparing the genes of young animals and old animals with and without lymphoma, the researchers found that “with age, a subtype of B cells emerges that becomes larger and more clonal (homogeneous).”
Researcher Jose Pedro Castro, cited in the statement, explains that the formation of this subtype of B cells occurs in two phases.
In the first stage, normal immune system cells become ABC cells, that is, cells associated with aging, and then, when they interact with each other and transform into ACBC (old clonal B cells), they have “a whole cancer program.”
“These are cells that are biologically much older than the animal itself and have the ability to divide, proliferate and invade other tissues. They are also highly inflammatory, and that is a serious problem for the tissues,” he says.
To confirm the characteristics of these cells, the researchers injected them into new mice, which then “died prematurely from cancer.”
“It was incredible to see that they started to die 30 days after the injection and two and a half months after the start of the experiment, only 50 percent of the animals were alive,” says Jose Pedro Castro.
The researchers later turned to publicly available genomic data from human blood and other tissues and found “the same ACBC signatures increasing with age, particularly in individuals with high B-cell clonality.”
This, says José Pedro Castro, “could pave the way for new biomarkers for cancer and other diseases of aging.”
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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