Researchers Discover Genes that Protect the Heart from Chemotherapy Damage

Researchers who were looking for the reason why the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin can destroy the heart discovered a whole series of genes that protect the cells from being damaged by it.

According to researchers at the Medical College of Georgia Cancer Center, as soon as they deactivated the genes, the cells became highly sensitive and ceased to grow. So if they can deactivate these genes in tumor cells, they will be more sensitive to the drug.

Doxorubicin is commonly used to treat solid cancers including breast cancer, prostate and ovarian cancer. A different version, daunorubicin, is used to fight leukemia and lymphoma. It is also commonly used in children.

In many cases, just when the patient completes the treatment for the cancer, they develop heart problems. Heart cells - cardiomyocytes- can commit suicide, which is a process called apoptosis. This causes dilative cardiomyopathy, a condition characterized by the heart becoming a boggy organ that no longer has the ability to pump blood. It can even take many years for the condition to appear and the only treatment is a heart transplant.

They hope that their research will lead to the prevention of the heart complications and maybe even a new and better treatment for the cancers by developing ways to turn just these genes off in the cancer cells and then turn them on in the heart cells. Another possibility is to just turn down their protective power in the cancer cells, which should make it possible to use less of the drugs, which would result in less damage to the heart, because the amount of damage is related to the dosage and it is cumluative.

They used yeast cells for the study because they only have 6,000 genes whereas humans have about 30,000. They are a good model to use to study human cells due to the fact that they include the same basic functions like replication, DNA repair, signaling and even cell death as the human genes do.