Jim Wells, a biologist at the University of California San Francisco, was studying proteins on the surface of cancer cells when he noticed one that wasn’t supposed to be there. This protein, called Src, should only be tucked inside cells.
“An accident,” he said, and a serendipitous one. Wells and his team report in Science that they have found Src on the surface of malignant cells, not healthy donor tissue. This discovery may bring scientists closer to a long-sought goal: finding an ideal immunotherapy target for solid tumors.
“It was certainly provocative and exciting to see this cancer-associated Src kinase now presented on the cell surface,” said Kathleen Yates, a biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University who did not work on the study. But, she added, it’s still too early to know how much clinical benefit there will be from targeting Src on the cell surface. “They’ve accomplished a great deal. It is an outstanding question as to whether this will be translationally impactful,” she said.
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