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Here's Today's Feel-Good Story:
Researchers at the University Of Massachusetts have discovered a small strand of microRNA, known as let-7, that could recognize and remember tumor cells. This cellular memory is how vaccines work, which could help improve cancer therapies.
“What we’ve discovered,” says Leonid Pobezinsky, associate professor of veterinary and animal sciences at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author, “is that a tiny piece of miRNA, let-7, which has been handed down the evolutionary tree since the dawn of animal life, is highly expressed in memory cells, and that the more let-7 a cell has, the less chance that it will be tricked by cancerous tumor cells, and the greater chance it has of turning into a memory cell.”