The researchers' recently published study describes a way to re-activate apoptosis in mutated cells, which would amount to forcing cancer to self-destruct through a bioengineered, bonding molecule.
Gerald Crabtree, one of the study's authors and a professor of development biology, said he had the idea while hiking through Kings Mountain, California, during the pandemic period. The new compound would have to bind two proteins which already exist in the cancerous cells, turning apoptosis back on and making the cancer kill itself.