Russian chemists discovered a surprising effect of a well-known leukemia drug

(RUDN University) Researchers from RUDN University and Institute of Biomedical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences have identified an alternative mechanism for the effective antitumor drug -- an enzyme called L-asparaginase. Some isoenzymes of L-asparaginase block the growth of telomeres (region of repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of a chromosome) on DNA molecules, and this limits the number of divisions of a cancer cell. This effect is reported in the Biochemical and Biophys...