Stopping Cancer in its Tracks Cancer researcher Kevin Dalby says
he thinks scientists are on track to find a cure for cancer one
day. Make that cures for cancers. There are so many ways for
cells to go bad and become cancerous that anti-cancer therapies
will need to include customized agents to modify various cancer-
causing targets. Dalby, a professor in the College of Pharmacy
at The University of Texas at Austin, and his laboratory are
working to identify and create some of these agents.
Specifically, they are working toward creating inhibitors of
pathways that go awry in cancer cells. Dalby’s research is in
the field of protein kinases, which modify other proteins and
regulate communication pathways in cells. When cell signals go
where they’re supposed to, the cell functions properly. When the
signals go off track, changes multiply down the line and cause
disease. “In cancer, many protein kinases have been found to be
disregulated through mutations in the genome of a cancer cell,”
he says. “So, their activ