Delhi Delhi. Australian researchers have found that DNA repair may determine how cancer cells die after radiotherapy. A new study has found that it may help improve cancer treatment and cure rates. The announcement by CMRI said that to understand how cancerous tumor cells die after radiotherapy, scientists at the Children's Medical Research Institute (CMRI) in Sydney used live cell microscope technology, Xinhua news agency reported. The irradiated cells were followed for one week after radiation therapy using.

“The surprising result of our research is that DNA repair, which normally protects healthy cells, determines how cancer cells die after radiotherapy,” said Tony Cesare, head of the CMRI Genome Integrity Unit. He said the study found that the DNA repair process can recognize when severe damage has occurred, such as from radiotherapy, and instruct the cancer cell to die. When the radiation-damaged DNA was repaired by a method called homologous recombination, they found that the cancer cells died during reproduction, a process called cell division or mitosis. Cesare said that death during cell division is ignored by the immune system, so it does not activate the desired immune response.

However, he said that cells that dealt with radiation-damaged DNA through other repair methods survived cell division, but released DNA repair byproducts into the cell. “For the cell, these repair byproducts may prevent viral or bacterial infection,” Cesare said. This causes the cancer cell to die in a way that puts the immune system on alert, which is what we want.”

The team showed that blocking homologous recombination changed the way cancer cells died, evoking a stronger immune response. The researchers said the discovery would make it possible to use drugs that could prevent cancer cells treated with radiotherapy from doing so. to alert the immune system to the existence of cancer that needs to be destroyed.