Telomerase activity in human cancer

The overall goal of this collaborative project was to investigate the role in malignant cells of both chromosome telomeres, and telomerase, the enzyme that replicates telomeres. Telomeres are highly conserved nucleoprotein complexes located at the ends of eucaryotic chromosomes. Telomere length in somatic cells is reduced by 40--50 nucleotide pairs with every cell division due to incomplete replication of terminal DNA sequences and the absence of telomerase, the ribonucleoprotein that adds telomere DNA to chromosome ends. Although telomerase is active in cells with extended proliferative capacities, including more than 85% of tumors, work performed under this contract demonstrated that the telomeres of human cancer cells are shorter than those of paired normal cells, and that the length of the telomeres is characteristic of particular types of cancers. The extent of telomere shortening ostensibly is related to the number of cell divisions the tumor has undergone. It is believed that ongoing cell proliferation leads to the accumulation and fixation of new mutations in tumor cell lineages.Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that the degree of phenotypic variability is related to the proliferative history of the tumor, and therefore to telomere length, implying a correlation with prognosis. In some human tumors, short telomeres are also correlated with genomic instabilities, including interstitial chromosome translocation, loss of heterozygosity, and aneuoploidy. Moreover, unprotected chromosome ends are highly recombinogenic and telomere shortening in cultured human cells correlates with the formation of dicentric chromosomes, suggesting that critically short telomeres not only identify, but also predispose, cells to genomic instability, again implying a correlation with prognosis. Therefore, telomere length or content could be an important predictor of metastatic potential or responsiveness to various therapeutic modalities