Not being a biologist, I had assumed that telomerase was “hard-coded” with the telomere DNA sequence it writes at the end of a chromosome. This is actually not quite the case; the coding for a telomere is encoded in a sequence of RNA that the telomerase wraps around (making it a ribonucleoprotein) called TERC.<\/p>\n
I, probably like many others, had once thought that inactivation of telomerase would result in a cure for many different cancers. However, for some reason, probably due to activation of other immortality pathways, this is not the case (although drugs that rely on this principle appear to be among the more successful treatment modalities in trials). This also appears to be one of those ideas that everyone is aware of but no one is acting on – I blame the way that science currently works for this (as I’ve mentioned before, how you express your values tangibly affects the impact you will have on reality; if you prefer to publish a lot and have a stable job, then you will not have the time to embark on the sorts of long-range high-risk research projects that actually make a difference).<\/p>\n
Anyway, mere inactivation is unlikely to work. However, because TERC actually provides a template for what telomerase writes on the end of the cell’s chromosomes, inactivation is not necessary.<\/p>\n
Here’s the fun part where I get to speculate wildly about the current state of the art because I can’t get the training that actually matters to actualize these sorts of ideas (you want your “committee of experts” and I’m the computer scientist. Fine, but the whole team suffers for the lack of synergy and vision):<\/p>\n
Modification would do as well. If we could change what telomerase writes out to the end of the cell, we can write anything we want to it – and it would be specific to telomerase-immortalized cells (few normal cells carry this immortality, but it is very common in cancer cells), which means a treatment based on this idea would have few to no side effects.<\/p>\n
What could we code for? I’m really not qualified to answer this, but some choices that seem obvious to me are the tumor suppressors that the cancers are inactivating in the first place, such as p53. Reactivate the suppressors, stop the tumors, and they won’t harm normal cells that produce telomerase but are making tumor-suppressors already. Again, minimal to no side effects.<\/p>\n
And that’s the idea! It’s another interdisciplinary fusion:<\/p>\n
This is what, in computer science, we would call a “buffer overflow with arbitrary code execution”. The code in this case is DNA. The “program counter” is the position of the ribosome. The end of the buffer is the telomere. Telomerase writes code out to the end of this buffer. You can take advantage of software this way by executing whatever code you want; you should be able to do the same to cells.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not being a biologist, I had assumed that telomerase was “hard-coded” with the telomere DNA sequence it writes at the end of a chromosome. This is actually not quite the case; the coding for a telomere is encoded in a sequence of RNA that the telomerase wraps around (making it a ribonucleoprotein) called TERC. I, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-ideas","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}