We have hundreds of genes which, when working properly, keep healthy cells in check.
Part of a family known as taxanes, paclitaxel is blunt chemotherapy that kills healthy cells alongside tumorous ones.
This tag team triggers the production of collagen and its spread to healthy cells around a wound site.
In the past radiation was a clumsy and undiscriminating weapon, killing cancer cells and healthy cells in one sweep.
However, he said there was a risk of side effects because the protein also plays important functions in healthy cells.
Regular chemotherapy works like an indiscriminate nuclear weapon it destroys a massive amount of healthy cells along with cancerous cells.
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One reason for this is that tumour cells have more ways of getting rid of foreign molecules than healthy cells do.
For example, monoclonal antibodies target and kill tumors while sparing healthy cells.
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It would then take on the cancer while leaving healthy cells alone.
One theory scientists have put forward to explain this, Kasai said, is that the virus could replicate more rapidly in young, healthy cells.
Skeptics questioned whether it was possible for such drugs to avoid causing toxic side effects and shutting down important functions in healthy cells.
IMC-C225 is targeted at a protein found on the outside of cancer cells and should attack cancer cells while leaving healthy cells relatively unharmed.
It was thought that having these mutations, to the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, could make healthy cells less able to repair any damage caused by radiotherapy.
Wong (now at Stanford University) figured the mutated gene might make an ideal target for a vaccine, as it creates an abnormal protein not seen in healthy cells.
In addition, these antibodies can bind to and destroy healthy cells as well as HIV-infected ones, making them a potentially useful but unpredictable partner in fighting the virus.
By comparing DNA from healthy cells with malignant ones, researchers can find genetic differences that might be what led the tumors to go bad in the first place.
But they say this is an advantage, because it means that cancer cells can be identified without having to pin down the precise molecular markers which make them different from healthy cells.
Most have one or more treatments on the market that act as HIV virus inhibitors to prevent the HIV virus from inserting the DNA genetic code necessary for replication into healthy cells.
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Like other viruses, HIV is a stripped-down invader: To reproduce and bud it uses a single, Swiss Army knife of a protein called GAG that hooks onto a protein normally present in healthy cells.
By mimicking the conditions created by melanomas, they showed that in the presence of tumour cells, the immune system sent out IgG4 antibodies, but when faced with healthy cells it functioned as expected with IgG1 circulating.
And the more money we're putting in, they're starting to come up with drugs that only kill the cancer cells and don't kill healthy cells, or that can be tailored to a particular kind of cancer that's matched up because of new genetic information.
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The host cell has no idea that its genetic code (which it generally needs to produce new, healthy cells) has been hijacked, for a long time at least, until the code has been copied and read to reproduce the virus many, many times by the host cell.
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In a cruel twist, the body's disease-fighting T cells attack healthy skin cells, misidentifying them as foreign.
If you have psoriasis, however, the T cells attack healthy skin cells by mistake, as if to heal a wound or to fight an infection.
The ultimate treatment might be using healthy stem cells to replace damaged cells in the macula.
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