We now fully understand a basic strategy that cells use to become resistant to drugs.
Vaults are barrel-shaped objects present in every cell in the body.
The significance of vaults' role in transportation increases when one learns that multi-drug resistant cancer cells are able to pump chemotherapeutic drugs out of themselves before those drugs have time to take effect. Rome and Kickhoefer have good reason to believe that vaults are one of the pumps that cancer cells use to fight off chemotherapy. In 1995, Dutch researcher Rik J. Scheper established that specific multi-drug resistant cells have unusually large amounts of a protein that is the main component of vaults. Scheper showed that a high concentration of major vault protein in an otherwise normal cell is the best predictor that the cell will, in time, become multi-drug resistant. Rome and his colleagues had been working with vaults for a decade, so Scheper contacted Rome and suggested a collaboration.