Two critical molecular on and off switches that govern cell processes are intricately bound together in a single control unit, cancer pharmacologists at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the Duke University Medical Center have reported. Their finding, like discovering that the accelerator and brakes of a car are mounted together, represents an important basic insight into the machinery that controls living cells. The discovery also offers the potential for a new strategy for developing drugs that would manipulate one or both of the linked switches to kill cancer cells or bacteria that invade the body, or to exert therapeutic control over cells.
Phosphatases are enzymes that remove phosphates from other enzymes.
Reporting the discovery were Ryan Westphal and Brian Wadzinsky of the Vanderbilt department of pharmacology, and Anthony Means and Kristin Anderson of the Duke department of pharmacology and cancer biology. Their research is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the Keck Foundation, and the Vanderbilt Diabetes Research and Training Center, Cancer Center and Center for Molecular Neuroscience. And there's a large amount of evidence that kinase activity is tightly regulated. This new finding provides an important insight into how that regulation takes place. The CaMKIV kinase that the researchers studied plays a critical part in activating T-cells, the warrior cells of the immune system that patrol the body seeking invaders such as viruses and bacteria.