Acoronary calcium scan

has a gatekeeper function for mitochondria, and that many of these tyrosine kinases are found within mitochondria. introducing a form of pDHK that is insensitive to tyrosine kinases into human cancer cells forces the cells to grow more slowly and form smaller tumors in mice, says Jing Chen, a hematology and medical oncology researcher at Winship. This finding indicates that pDHK could be a target for drugs that specifically target cancer cells’ altered metabolism. “pDHK is a very attractive target for anticancer therapy because of its role in regulating cancer metabolism,” he says.

The experimental drug dichloroacetate, which inactivates pDHK, is in clinical trials for cancer. Chen is collaborating with Haian Fu, director of the Emory Chemical Biology Discovery Center, to find other, more potent inhibitors of pDHK.

proved to have the highest cost-benefit ratio in identifying cardiac risk, compared with other screening measures (inflammation, carotid artery thickness, and peripheral artery blood pressure), according to Emory cardiology researcher Leslee Shaw. She analyzed data from 6,000 middle-aged and elderly people across the United States.