An international team including researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia has discovered a new way to treat conditions like cancer and diabetes..

The researchers, led by Mike Waters, a professor at the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Queensland, have published their findings in Science..

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The professor explains that we don't know enough about how growth hormone works to be able to develop drugs to fight these diseases..

Growth hormone, like any other hormone in our body, acts with the help of special receptors - unique proteins on the surface of cells that bind only to this hormone according to the "

The team of researchers suggested that learning more about how growth hormone interacts with cell receptors could lead to new targets for diabetes and cancer drugs..

This assumption did not arise out of the blue.. Professor Waters has been studying growth hormone for 45 years.. They first cloned the growth hormone receptor with the help of the global biotech company Genentech..

“We have figured out how growth hormone turns on its receptor at the molecular level, and therefore now we have an idea of \u200b\u200bwhich part of the molecule to target new drugs that will help fight these diseases,” said the professor..

The discovery will be useful in other areas Lead author of the study, Dr. Andrew Brooks (Andrew Brooks) says that the prospects for their research are much broader than the treatment of cancer and diabetes: “The growth hormone receptor is one of a group of proteins known as cytokine receptors.. It is a very important target for the treatment of a range of diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, hematological diseases, osteoporosis and obesity.”.

He says that a better understanding of how growth hormone works also gives insight into how other related cytokine receptors work, and this is a direct path to the creation of many drugs for a wide variety of immune, metabolic, hematological diseases..

For their study, the team used a combination of crystal structures, cell biology experiments, biophysical measurements, dynamic receptor models, the latest data processing technologies, and more..

The results of the work suggest that the receptor remains in a dormant state, which depends on two components that inhibit each other.. But when growth hormone binds to the receptor, it causes structural changes that “awaken” these two components, trigger their mutual activation and a specific cell response..

This model of mutual inhibition and activation, according to scientists, may also show how other cytokine receptors work..

Funding for this promising study was provided by the Australian Cancer Research Foundation, the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council..

In January 2011, foreign publications reported on how the " Then a research team from St. Louis University (USA) discovered the substance MZ-5-156, which acts completely opposite to growth hormone and is able to suppress certain types of tumors (lung cancer, prostate cancer, brain cancer and breast cancer).

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