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Corporate Profile
As anyone familiar with the party game "telephone" knows, when people try to pass a message from one individual to another in a line, they usually garble the words beyond recognition. It might seem surprising, then, that mere molecules inside our cells constantly enact their own version of telephone without distorting the relayed information in the least.
Actually, no one could survive without such precise signaling in cells. The body functions properly only because cells communicate with one another constantly. Pancreatic cells, for instance, release insulin to tell muscle cells to take up sugar from the blood for energy. Cells of the immune system instruct their cousins to attack invaders, and cells of the nervous system rapidly fire messages to and from the brain. Those messages elicit the right responses only because they are transmitted accurately far into a recipient cell and to the exact molecules able to carry out the directives.
Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals
But how do circuits within cells achieve this high-fidelity transmission? For a long time, biologists had only rudimentary explanations. In the past 15 years, though, they have made great progress in unlocking the code that cells use for their internal communications. The ongoing advances are suggesting radically new strategies for attacking diseases that are caused or exacerbated by faulty signaling in cells--among them cancer, diabetes and disorders of the immune system.
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"...Actually, no one could survive without such precise signaling in cells. The body functions properly only because cells communicate with one another constantly..."
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