They find the tools to repair damaged DNA linked to aging or cancer

Until now, the ways to repair this type of DNA damage are poorly understood, but scientists hope to exploit this novel set of repair proteins to protect us from aging, cancer and neurological diseases.

The findings could also have implications for chemotherapy, which deliberately causes breaks in DNA when trying to kill cancer cells.

Scientists believe that targeting the TEX264 protein may offer a new way to treat cancer.

‘If DNA breaks in our genome are not repaired, this can affect our ability to enjoy a healthy life in old age, as well as leaving us vulnerable to neurological diseases such as motor neurone disease (MND). We hope that by understanding how our cells repair DNA breaks, we can help overcome some of these challenges, as well as explore new ways to treat cancer in the future,” said Sherif El-Khamisy, co-founder and deputy director of the Healthy Lifespan Institute at the University of Sheffield.

For Kristijan Ramadan, from the University of Oxford, one of the leaders of the research, “the discovery of TEX264, a protein that forms the specialized machinery to digest toxic proteins in our DNA, significantly changes the current understanding of how cells repair the genome and, therefore, protect us from accelerated aging, cancer and neurodegeneration. “I believe this discovery has great potential for cancer therapy in the future and we are already carrying out our research in that direction.”