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20 April 2026
Appetite for Cancer
Specialist cells 'eating' (phagocytosis) or 'nibbling' (trogocytosis) damaged or targeted cells are part of the body's natural defences and housekeeping. Key to these processes is an enzyme called Rac, and a new kind of immunotherapy is emerging that relies on boosting Rac to encourage the gobbling up of cancer cells. To better understand this principle, here migratory cells of the fruit fly ovary bearing hyperactivated Rac in only a few cells were found to trigger destruction of a much larger cell mass
Read the published research article here
Written by
- Still from video from work by Lauren Penfield and Abhinava K. Mishra, and colleagues
- Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
- Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), April 2026
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