An international team led by Dr. Anton Henssen, group leader of the Genomic Instability in Pediatric Tumors lab at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center, a joint institution of Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center, has now identified a potential target.
As the researchers report in Nature Genetics, the DNA rings lose their activity when they become trapped outside the cell nucleus in micronuclei—a process that also occurs naturally in cancer cells. Consequently, active compounds that drive ecDNA into micronuclei may help treat some metastatic cancers.