Magazine · Issue 01 · Innovation
Mechanomedicine, a new therapeutic language for cancer?
The heart almost never develops cancer. Prof. Serena Zacchigna’s team at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology(ICGEB) and at the University of Trieste, Italy, have worked out why, and stumbled on a new idea for fighting the disease: not with a drug, but with force. Their finding, that the muscle’s mechanical motion switches off the genes cancer cells need to divide, opens a field she calls mechanomedicine, another therapeutic language to set beside
chemistry.
