This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

A team of scientists in Norway has found evidence for a new mechanism for the development of cancer in children: They seem to produce an unusual amount of aberrant antibodies against the building blocks that make up the DNA repair machinery, a diverse set of hundreds of proteins that identify and correct damage or errors in the genome.

This discovery could open the door to the early screening of small children, in the hope of ultimately preventing them from developing such pediatric cancers in their teenage years.

"We showed that many children with various types of cancer have antibodies against some of their own DNA repair proteins. We also demonstrated that such 'autoantibodies' can enter live cells and bind to—and probably inhibit—the activity of these essential proteins," said corresponding author Dr. Ola Myklebost, an emeritus professor of molecular oncology at the University of Bergen.

Pediatric cancers, such as leukemia, myeloma, neuroblastoma and osteosarcoma, differ from adult cancers in their causes, location and type, and response to therapy.

Compared to adults, children have had less time to accumulate cancerous DNA damage through exposure to environmental stressors, lifestyle factors and aging. Pediatric cancers thus tend to carry fewer mutations than adult ones and arise from less mature cells, for example, stem or progenitor cells.

Serguienko, Myklebost and colleagues characterized the proteome—the ensemble of expressed proteins—in tumor and blood samples from 175 adults and children with sarcoma or acute lymphoblastic leukemia, collected between 2014 and 2017 through the NoSarC Norwegian Sarcoma Study, the Norwegian Childhood Cancer Biobank and the Oslo University Hospital Cancer Research Biobank.

Source link