Question: what is the biggest discovery you have made

Sinead Loughran answered on 14 Nov 2016:

During my Phd studies, as part of a team of researchers, I made a discovery about a gene involved in a particular type of cancer.

The gene I studied in detail was called ‘Bfl-1’. The Bfl-1 gene is a gene that can cause a cell to survive beyond it’s natural lifetime. In basic terms, every cell in the body has a lifespan after which it dies. Cancer arises when the normal death messages are changed or blocked and the cell does not die but instead survives and divides repeatedly until it causes problems (e.g. a tumour).

In my research I found that a virus caused the Bfl-1 switch to stay on in an immune cell causing the cell to survive when it should have died. By hijacking the cell in this way, the virus was causing cancer. I found that when I turned the Bfl-1 gene off, the cell was easily destroyed by chemo drugs.

You can read more about it here…

Protein crucial to Hodgkin’s lymphoma identified