“We thought that there would have been a different set of (genetic) mutations, a different spectrum of mutations that would have explained why (the recurring) cells were resistant to chemotherapy,” Dick says.
“And in a sense that’s not what we saw. We saw . . . that they seemed to be quite similar or essentially identical (genetically) and so something else was driving their resistance to therapy.”
Slatkovska, whose society has funded Dick in the past but was not involved in the current study, says she can imagine the creation of drugs that could wake up the sleeping cells and expose them to killer chemo.
Drugs that could interfere with the external signals that call the dormant cells out of sleep could also become a weapon in the oncology arsenal, Dick says.
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