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For Release: February 11, 2010
Contact:
David Corriveau, Media Relations Officer, Dartmouth Medical School, at David.A.Corriveau@Dartmouth.edu or 603-653-0771


DMS graduate student and study author
Sarah Thompson

Principal investigator
Duane A. Compton, Ph.D.

Thompson, Compton probe tumor-suppressor

Lebanon, N.H.—Dartmouth researchers Sarah Thompson and Duane Compton, Ph.D., continue to make progress in their laboratory's search for ways to exploit chromosomal instability (CIN) in cells to suppress the growth of cancer.

In a study they recently published in the Journal of Cell Biology, Compton, a Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) professor of biochemistry, and Thompson, a graduate student working toward her Ph.D. in the Compton laboratory at DMS, describe marking a chromosome with a fluorescent trace to show that, unlike aneuploid tumor cells, normal cells fail to grow when they mis-segregate the marked chromosome.

"Aneuploidy arises when chromosomes mis-segregate during cell division and is common in many tumors," Compton says. The research is important because it could lead to a method for suppressing cancer cell growth."

A review of the Compton/Thompson study appears in the same edition of Cell Biology. More information about their research is described here and here.

Compton and Thompson also have contributed to the recent cancer-prevention work of the laboratory of Ethan Dmitrovsky, M.D., DMS's Andrew G. Wallace Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology and an American Cancer Society professor, most recently in the January edition of the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

-DMS-

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