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Multidrug Resistance in Cancer: The Threat of Giant Multinucleated Cells
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Dr Aditya Parekh*
Email: adityaparekh@ncbs.res.in
This piece of the story describes the results of my latest research, which is based on the multidrug resistance in cancer. It explains how multinucleated giant cancer cells interact with other cancer cells and its implications in multidrug resistance. To keep things simple and less technical, I have planned to dissect the story into small sections and tried to resolve the technical terms into understandable sentences. The tour begins here.
What is cancer?
Most of us in the past have had a family, friends, or heard of someone being diagnosed with cancer. The deadly nature of the disease can be realized from the fighting stories of patients with cancer. The data published
last year by the World Health Organization indicated that cancer was the second largest cause of deaths in India after heart diseases. In our attempt to understand the nature of the disease, let us find out why it poses a huge threat and represents a complex problem for the scientists to decode. Cancer often initiates due to the minor but harmful changes in the genetic material (DNA) of the healthy cells in the body, causing it to function abnormally. The change in DNA leads to the synthesis of faulty proteins, which subsequently causes aberrations in the molecular functioning of a cell. Although most of these abnormal cells are cleared by the body’s immune system, very few cells that escape this clearance have the potential to turn into cancer. These cells are called transformed cells, which can
* Dr Aditya Parekh, Post-Doctoral Fellow from National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, is pursuing his research on “Transcriptional Regulation in Muscles”. His popular science story entitled “Multidrug Resistance in Cancer: The Threat of Giant Multinucleated Cells” has been selected for AWSAR Award.