Protein P53: The Dictator of Life and Death

From an article in Yahoo Health:

"It's a tiny molecule with a nondescript name — "p53" — but it has an awesome responsibility: preventing more than half of all human cancers. Some scientists call it the 'guardian angel,' 'guardian of the genome,' or the 'dictator of life and death.'

"P53 is a protein, a string of 393 chemical units stored in the DNA of most of the body's cells. Normally, p53 works to suppress malignant tumors. When it's missing or mutated, however, it can't carry out its lifesaving mission and lets cancerous cells run amok. Scientists are developing drugs to repair or restore damaged p53 in mice, but so far none of those drugs are ready to treat human cancers.

"Almost 50,000 papers about p53 have been published in scientific journals, but its workings are still not fully understood, and it's little known outside the worlds of biology and medicine.

"P53 is 'certainly the most studied protein in the whole history of cancer,' Magali Olivier , an expert at the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyons, France , wrote in the journal Cancer Gene Therapy this fall.

"...Here's how it works: A normal p53 protein detects a patch of DNA in the nucleus of a cell that has been damaged by accident, a virus, radiation, smoking or other environmental assaults, raising the chance that the cell will turn cancerous. P53 triggers a complex biochemical program that stops the pre-cancerous cell from dividing until it repairs its DNA or commits suicide.

"When p53 itself is flawed, however, it allows other cancer-causing genes (known as oncogenes) to hijack the cell's control machinery and set it free to spread wildly — the hallmark of cancer."

With all the attention being paid to P53, it's only a matter of time before scientists understand it more, and develop an agent that will counterattack its effects.