Making a Movement Machine
by William Wells
June, 2000
Moving cells make an excellent drug target. But what proteins should the drugs be aimed at? First researchers must learn how a tangled mesh of proteins keeps a cell motoring forwards.
A slice of fish skin or a chunk of cow heart in a culture dish doesn’t sit there quietly. The cells march across the dish in a futile attempt to heal a perceived wound. The same mobilization happens in people: cells called fibroblasts flood into cuts, immune cells burrow through tissues to seek out invaders, embryonic cells clamber over each other to form young organs, and cancer cells spread. Our body seethes with movement.
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Colon cancer cells:
on the move and
stuck in place.
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Drugs that exploit subtle variations in cell movement might keep cancer cells stuck in one place while leaving immune cells free to roam. For that reason, the National Cancer Institute has investigated chemicals that trip up a key movement protein. And a company called Cytokinetics, Inc. (South San Francisco, California) is also keeping a close eye on cell movement research. Cytokinetics is interested in drugs that mess with the cell’s internal system of structural beams and highways, called the cytoskeleton. "There’s a richness of understanding of the role of the cytoskeleton," says Cytokinetics CEO James Sabry, "and that for us represented a real opportunity."
One of the cytoskeleton’s most important jobs is to move cells around. Although Sabry anticipates tackling cell movement in the future, for now he is focussing on other functions of the cytoskeleton, such as cell division. What Sabry is waiting for is a better understanding of how the cell movement machine works. For such an important process, an understanding of the mechanics of cell movement has remained surprisingly obscure.
But that picture is changing. In recent work, scientists have looked at the location and movements of single proteins, and managed to convert a disorganized parts list into a blueprint for a working engine. There are no pistons or flywheels in this engine, just a dense protein mesh that somehow creates movement.
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Making a Movement Machine
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