Her early studies identified BEND3 as a potentially important player in the system. Prasanth's laboratory focuses on cell cycle regulators. Finding a molecular switch that will shift cancer cells away from proliferation and toward differentiation could aid in cancer treatment. Stem cells have the capacity to repopulate a cancer tumor after it has shrunk during treatment, Prasanth said. The more differentiated a tumor is, the better the prognosis." "The prognosis of how cancer cells will respond to treatment often relates to its status of differentiation. "In most cancers, cells are going through this rampant proliferation because cell-cycle regulators are not functioning properly," she said. The findings are relevant to understanding normal development and also may be useful in cancer research, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cell and developmental biology professor and department head Supriya Prasanth, who led the research. Once they differentiate, they usually stop actively proliferating. Only when BEND3 is downregulated can cells adopt their final form and function. They discovered that a molecule known as BEND3 shuts down expression of hundreds of genes associated with differentiation, maintaining the cell's stem cell-like status. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have identified a key regulator of this process.
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