Here’s an article I haphazardly discovered today on an important sirtuin protein called SIRT4. Harvardianites have discovered that when SIRT4 is absent from mice, the cell cycle doesn’t function to arrest cell division and keep the cell from becoming malignant/cancerous. SIRT4 acts as a physiological weigh-station to prevent the cell from proceeding when there’s a stressed, cancer-producing environment (such as with excessive UV rays) that could lead to cancer. What does this mean? It means that drug discovery could have room for a new target that could lead to some important therapies. I’m interested in it. During undergrad I did undergraduate research in drug discovery and got a sense of what goes into figuring all of these systems out. I appreciate this research greatly.

Here’s the link to the article: http://hms.harvard.edu/news/cancer-checkpoint-4-4-13

Tell them Isaac sent you.