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Researchers cracked how air po...Researchers cracked how air pollution can lead to cancer
The Silicon Review
12 September, 2022
Author:
The Silicon Review Team
Researchers in a discovery have found how air pollution leads to cancer, which will completely transform our understanding of how tumors arise.
The team at the Francis Crick Institute in London showed that air pollution wakes up old damaged cells rather than causing damage. Prof Charles Swanton, one of the world's leading experts said that the breakthrough marked a “new era”. This discovery might enable experts to develop drugs that can stop forming cancer. It could also explain how hundreds of cancer-causing substances act on the body.
According to the classical view, cancer starts with a healthy cell. It acquires more and more mutations in its DNA, or genetic code until it reaches a tipping point, which then turns into cancer and grows uncontrollably. But there seems some problem with the classic idea. The cancerous mutations are found in healthy tissue and many substances causing cancer don’t seem to damage DNA.
The researchers, working at University College London, produced evidence of a different idea. According to the idea the damage is already there in the cell's DNA, and it picked up as we grow and age. However, something needs to pull the trigger that actually makes it cancerous.
