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New research has suggested that an enzyme called telomerase, which is involved in cell division, may be a good target for anti-cancer treatments. Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco tinkered with telomerase in cancer cells to cause the cells to grow more slowly or even to kill themselves.

Telomerase helps regulate the length of telomeres, the bits of DNA at the end of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, its telomeres shorten. Eventually, the telomeres become too short, and the cell dies. Telomerase, which restores some of the lost length of telomeres, is inactive in most cells, but it kicks into overdrive in cancer cells, causing them to divide over and over again.

To interrupt this rapid growth, researchers inserted a gene mutation into a small section of telomerase in human prostate and breast cancer cells. Even though the mutations were present in only a small portion of telomerase, cancer cells grown in the lab were much less likely to reproduce and more likely to die than normal cancer cells.

When the modified breast cancer cells were grafted onto mice, the tumors that developed were much smaller than tumors in mice with ordinary breast cancer cells.

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2001;98:7982), the mutation that the researchers inserted in telomerase does not affect the length of most telomeres in a cell. In fact, the researchers suspect that "uncapping" just one telomere in a cell may be enough to make the cell commit suicide.