Despite its crucial role in cancer, the process of cell immortalization is still poorly understood. Now, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have devised a new method for creating immortal human mammary epithelial cells. Senior scientist Martha Stampfer says that this allows them to study cell immortalization as it occurs in humans.

"There are two main tumor suppressor barriers for a normal cell to become abnormal. Then the question was, could we cleanly inactivate those two barriers so we could take a normal cell and have it become immortal cleanly. That is, not with all this instability and all these unknowns. So one, we could examine the process and two, to do it in a highly efficient way so you could examine it experimentally."

Stampfer says that this new procedure may lead to new cancer treatment options.

"That is, to identify processes that are essential for immortalization and then being able to devise pharmacological interventions that would prevent that from happening."