The Wistar Institute’s president and CEO, Dario C. Altieri, and his team have demonstrated the role of Parkin—a protein implicated in Parkinson’s disease—in the body’s innate immune response to cancer. Parkin is not expressed in several cancers. Altieri and his team engineered cancer cells to re-express Parkin and found that Parkin contributes to the production of interferons, which activate and attract T cells to fight the tumor. The lab’s findings were published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Tumors are able to form without any DNA mutations, according to a recent proof-of-principle study performed in flies. Epigenetic changes alone—even temporary alterations—induced permanent cancer cell fate.
