Project Status and Findings:
Information about this project is provided on the web pages below and by the project scientists on the Help Conquer Cancer website. For the latest status report, please go to the Help Conquer Cancer status report. To comment or ask questions about this project, please submit a post in the Help Conquer Cancer forum.
Mission
The mission of Help Conquer Cancer is to improve the results of protein X-ray crystallography, which helps researchers not only annotate unknown parts of the human proteome, but importantly improves their understanding of cancer initiation, progression and treatment.
Significance
In order to significantly impact the understanding of cancer and its treatment, novel therapeutic approaches capable of targeting metastatic disease (or cancers spreading to other parts of the body) must not only be discovered, but also diagnostic markers (or indicators of the disease), which can detect early stage disease, must be identified.
Researchers have been able to make important discoveries when studying multiple human cancers, even when they have limited or no information at all about the involved proteins. However, to better understand and treat cancer, it is important for scientists to discover novel proteins involved in cancer, and their structure and function.
Scientists are especially interested in proteins that may have a functional relationship with cancer. These are proteins that are either over-expressed or repressed in cancers, or proteins that have been modified or mutated in ways that result in structural changes to them.
Improving X-ray crystallography will enable researchers to determine the structure of many cancer-related proteins faster. This will lead to improving our understanding of the function of these proteins and enable potential pharmaceutical interventions to treat this deadly disease.
