1
Physiology & Medicine / Re: What are the available cancer strategies?
« on: 28/05/2019 08:42:33 »I don’t think I have a tried & tested or failed cancer therapy but I have been thinking about a cancer strategy that can help us find a cure for cancer. It involves a newly developed technology called NGS or Next Generation Sequencing. NGS technology has huge applications in the field of biotechnology, genetics, oncology, etc. and could help us detect various anomalies at cellular level. NGS software can sequence RNA in less time and help us analyse the output data. Now let me explain what output data is if you aren’t familiar with NGS. This technology sequences RNA and collects the data of the total RNA population in a particular cell. The NGS data analysis software gives us this output data after running NGS and allows us to investigate and understand gene expression. RNA is very important to our research because analysing RNA allows us to look at the changes taking place at molecular level that may be causing mutations or errors leading to various gene expressions. The changes or modifications taking place at molecular level could be alternative splicing which give different transcripts from one single gene sequence, the post-transcriptional modifications of mRNA like polyadenylation and capping and the amino acids that are produced after the alterations. All of this could cause different gene expression leading to some anomaly. I feel like NGS and RNA sequencing could help us figure out what is causing the mutations and why the cancer cells become unresponsive to cell signals from healthy cells. It could also give us an insight into the level of gene expression and how the expression shuts off or gets activated. I haven’t really done a lot of research on this topic so corrections or suggestions are really welcome. I have studied immunology which led me to looking at RNA sequencing in a different perspective.
Hi Steph, thanks for your input.
How would you treat cancer with that?
I think finding a cure would come very late in the picture because right now what we can do with the NGS software is look at the gene expression arising from splicing and translation of that spliced mRNA. And also, try and understand the relation of the mutations taking place in the cell to the cancer cells getting developed. I know we are nowhere close to solving it but I guess with this technology our perspective of looking at cancer cells will change. I'm really not an expert. Just some estimations from my end