Kang finds keys to control the ‘driver of cancer’s aggressiveness’

Illustration of SNAI2 (pronounced snail-too), a dangerous protein that helps cancers metastasize and hide from treatment.

Inside our cells, a sophisticated recycling system uses its own enzymatic signs to flag certain cells for destruction — and a different set of enzymes can remove those flags. Changing the balance between those two groups might provide a way to control a dangerous protein called SNAI2 that helps cancers metastasize, said Yibin Kang, Princeton’s Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology, who has spent his career studying the cells and molecules behind metastatic cancers. His team has a pair of papers coming out in next month’s issue of Genes and Development, released online today. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/09/17/kang-finds-keys-control-driver-cancers-aggressiveness