A Purdue University team led by Kyle Cottrell has discovered a new therapeutic target for triple-negative breast cancer.
“Triple-negative breast cancer is a particularly deadly form of breast cancer that currently lacks targeted therapies,” said Cottrell, an assistant professor of biochemistry. Cottrell, biochemistry graduate student Addison Young and their co-authors describe the discovery in the journal RNA.
The laboratory research spotlights double-stranded ribonucleic acid (dsRNA)-binding proteins. “Generally, people are taught in high school biology that RNA is single-stranded. That’s not entirely true,” Cottrell noted. Human cells contain many double-stranded segments of RNA, as do viruses.
“We have proteins that can recognize those double-stranded RNAs,” Cottrell said. When cells detect that…