Zou's research highlighted
JOHNSON CITY (Oct. 26, 2015) – The research work of a professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at East Tennessee State University’s Quillen College of Medicine recently was highlighted in a prestigious scientific journal.
Dr. Yue Zou, in collaboration with fellow faculty member Dr. Phillip Musich and Dr. Kun Ping Lu at Harvard Medical School, is studying a DNA damage response protein within cells and its involvement with cancer prevention. Their work is highlighted in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology’s October edition. The article, written by Senior Editor Kirsty Minton, is titled “DNA Damage Response: ATR prevents premature apoptosis,” highlighting the group’s research that was recently published in the top-tier journal Molecular Cell.
It discusses the ATR, or Ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3-related, protein and its ability to prevent programmed cell death in the body. The article further analyzes ATR’s function in promoting cell survival for long enough to enable DNA repair.
ATR’s ability to protect cells in the body is both good and bad, according to Zou.
“ATR protects our normal, healthy cells from dying prematurely, which is good,” he says. “But, we have found it also protects carcinogenic and cancer cells from dying. Because ATR can protect the carcinogenic cells, inhibiting ATR by small molecules such as caffeine present in coffee and tea may help to prevent cancer.”
While ATR is a needed protein inside the body and often serves a positive function, finding ways to stop it from protecting cancer cells is important for cancer treatment, Zou noted.
Zou is conducting his research related to ATR through a National Institutes of Health grant.
Benjamin Hilton and Zhengke Li, who are Dr. Zou’s students, are the co-first authors of the Molecular Cell paper.