Science

Cancer? Yeast has answers

• Fascinating
• Relevant
• Ingenious

(ESPAÑOL: Podeis encontrar la versión en español del proyecto aquí y el video aquí)

Cancer is a group of diseases that have a common characteristic: their cells divide without any control. The mechanisms that control the division process of a cell are very important and are very well regulated to avoid these problems. And these processes are so important that the key proteins involved in them are really conserved (they are more or less the same) through the evolution: from yeast to humans.

We usually know yeast because it makes beer, wine and bread, but actually, many discoveries about cell division have been done working with it. In addition, these discoveries were proved to be true in humans as well. Working with yeast is simpler because it is quite cheap and fast to work with it. If we want to identify how one protein works in humans we can test first what it does in yeast. In yeast we can test many different possibilities and when we identify how it works we publish the discoveries and people working with mice or human cells test that in their models.

At the end all the knowledge generated by the collaboration of all the scientists working with the different models will give a clear clue of what is happening in humans and it will be possible to generate a drug to treat the problem we were addressing in the first instance. In our case: cancer.

In our lab in Manchester we study a protein called Polo kinase. The amount of this protein is increased in many cancers and is one of the proteins involved in promoting the cell division. As you can imagine, yeast has a polo kinase as well. What we do it's trying to find out how this polo kinase interacts in the cell with other proteins. If some of these secondary proteins are important for the Polo kinase function in promoting the uncontrolled division of the cell, inhibiting the specific interaction between them and the Polo kinase can be a new way to try to treat cancer.

But even if working with yeast is cheaper than working with mice, some general and routine techniques are not cheap at all. For instance, we use antibodies to be able to see the proteins. Within the cell or in other conditions.

These antibodies are custom made and that makes the whole process quite expensive. What I mean with custom made is that we send a good amount of the protein that the antibody has to see to a place where they inject it into sheep.

For the sheep this protein is a "foreign" molecule and they will try to defend themselves against it. They do it in the same way that we fight a virus infection. They produce antibodies that will see the protein and this will facilitate its elimination. At the end, the protein will be gone from the blood of the sheep but the specific antibody against it will stay.

We get that blood and separate the antibody from the rest of things present in the blood. These antibodies are really crucial for our research and getting an antibody that will see a specific protein can cost between 900$ and 1500$. So, the money I ask for here is mainly to be able to get new antibodies to work with.

Working with yeast is the very first step of the worldwide research that it's been done related to cancer and it's very important. It's so important that in 2001 the Nobel Price of Medicine and Physiology went to Sir Paul Nurse, who found in yeast the main protein involved in cell division and that ended it up being the same one in humans.

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