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Washington, D.C. — An international team of researchers lead by Jeffrey Cossman, M.D., of the Georgetown University Medical School and including Human Genome Sciences Inc., the National Cancer Institute and the University of Milan, Italy have discovered the origin of the cell that causes Hodgkin’s disease, a finding that may someday lead to better treatments and methods of diagnosis. Hodgkin’s disease is the most common cancer of Americans between the ages of 10 and 30. Hodgkin’s is a cancer of the lymph-node system characterized by the mysterious Reed-Sternberg cell whose origin has eluded investigators since its description a century ago. Since the Reed-Sternberg cells make up only a fraction of the total tumor mass, it has been difficult to identify exactly where these cancerous cells come from.
Using new computerized gene-analysis methods, the researchers from Georgetown and Human Genome Sciences were able to compare the gene sequence of the Reed-Sternberg cells to sequences of other cells. They determined that the cancer cell was derived from so-called B-cells, immune cells whose normal function is to produce antibodies. The study, published in the journal Blood and on a Georgewtown Website,
www.hodgkins.georgetown.edu/, provided some hints as to why the cells cause cancer. While normal cells contain self-destruct mechanisms to prevent them from growing out of control, this mechanism was partly missing in the cancerous cells. Human Genome Sciences, Inc. is a Rockville, MD., biotechnology company.
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