All over the world, efforts are being made to understand the mechanism of cancer. Now, in this context, the different stages of cancer during cell division (cell division) of a living cell are understood in great detail, which will lead to new methods of treatment.
Think of it as the process of wound healing starting with cells. During the division of a healthy cell, when the cell breaks, identical copies of each chromosome are made, which go on to divide into two cells.
All this work is done under a complex biological machine called the 'mitotic spindle'. Now if there is a slight disturbance, identical copies of the chromosomes are not found and this process is called 'Aneuploidy'. Thus, both cells are deprived of the same genetic information and are defective.
Remember that cancerous cells are also 'aneuploid' but until now we did not understand this process in detail. Now Professor Stephen Rowell of the University of Warwick and his colleagues have looked at it in detail.
They say that some chromosomes get stuck in some membranes near the cell spindle and disappear. Thus, cell division is disrupted and as a result, a cancerous cell is formed.
For this, a kind of tearing (surgery) of the cells had to be done. Even a new method had to be devised to extract the chromosomes trapped in the membrane. Even missing chromosomes are recovered and normal and healthy cell division is carried out.
This led to two discoveries, firstly, that chromosomal shedding and trapping in membranes causes cancer, and secondly, that by blocking this process at the cellular level, new cancer treatments could be discovered.
Many scientists have looked at cell division before, but they have looked at the spindle, while Professor Stephen has looked at membranes in cell division. If this process is stopped at the first stage, the development of cancer can be stopped at the first stage itself.