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Cancer treatment breakthrough by Australian professor

Xinhua, March 31, 2015 Adjust font size:

An all-new generation of long- lasting drugs for melanoma may flow from a new discovery by an Australian researcher.

The University of Newcastle announced on Tuesday that Professor Xu Dong Zhang had made the discovery which has excited other researchers around the world.

Professor Zhang found that a protein known as RIP1, previously linked to natural cell death in the body, has a pro-survival function in melanoma cells.

"We started investigating RIP1 from a perspective of necrotic cell death before finding that it actually plays an important role in regulating melanoma cell survival ... We had to turn our entire thinking around," Zhang said.

"It appears to be upregulated from the earliest stages of melanoma so if we can inhibit the molecule's survival mechanism we believe we'll be able to kill melanoma cells, either alone or in combination with existing drugs." Endi