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It has long been known that cigarette smoke is
a major cause of lung cancer and contributes to the development
of other malignancies. To fill the need for a rapid and
sensitive assay to estimate the potential carcinogenicity of
tobacco and related products, researchers in the laboratory of
Dr. Zbigniew Darzynkiewicz at New York Medical College have
developed a methodology based on analysis of the DNA damage
response in normal pulmonary endothelial and A549 adenocarcinoma.
The technique, employing CompuCyte’s laser scanning cytometry
(LSC) technology, has been awarded US patent No.
7,662,565.
In a forthcoming publication in
the journal
Cell Cycle, E.D.
Jorgensen, H. Zhao, F. Traganos, A.P. Albino and Darzynkiewicz
apply their approach to commercially available tobacco- and
nicotine-free cigarettes, which were expected to be less
hazardous than regular tobacco cigarettes. The authors
report that the these products actually induce more extensive
DNA damage than the tobacco cigarettes.
The group’s data imply
that exposure of cells to smoke from tobacco- and nicotine-free
cigarettes leads to formation of double-strand DNA breaks (DSBs).
Since DSBs are potentially carcinogenic, the data indicate that
smoking tobacco- and nicotine-free cigarettes is at least as
hazardous as smoking cigarettes containing tobacco and nicotine.
The authors conclude that their methodology to assess the
potential carcinogenic properties of tobacco smoke, based on
measurement of DNA damage response as assessed by LSC, provides
a useful addition to the battery of genotoxic tests for probing
cigarette smoke hazards. Such tests, which can be applied to
evaluate the effects of cigarettes and cigarette surrogate
products on human health, can be important tools for regulatory
agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration or, in the
case of environmental smoke, by the Environmental Protection
Agency.
The
paper, “DNA damage response induced by exposure of human lung
adenocarcinoma cells to smoke from tobacco- and nicotine-free
cigarettes,” will appear in the June 1 issue of
Cell Cycle
(Volume 9, Issue 11), an increasingly influential journal within
the biomedical research community.
The open-access
article is available at
http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cc/article/JorgensenCC9-11.pdf.
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