Video 4: Dr Carolyn Williams – Cell signalling pathways
[Image on screen: Dr Carolyn Williams against white background]
[Text on screen: Dr Carolyn Williams, Medical Researcher, Harry Perkins
Institute of Medical research]
Signalling pathways are a normal process in all cells. And to give you an analogy
of what, what a signalling pathway is like, it’s like, you imagine a busy road with
lots of sets of traffic lights, and, so the signal travels along the traffic light, travels
along the road, and every time it gets to a traffic light there’s a signal and there’s
a checkpoint and you can either go or stop and that’s a normal functioning cell.
So it stops at the red light, goes at the green light and moves on to the next set of
traffic lights, so that’s the signalling pathway. [Image on screen: Dr Carolyn
Williams uses hand gestures to demonstrate traffic lights on road.]
In cancer there can be a mutation in one of those checkpoints, which causes the
signalling pathway to go haywire and an example of that would be if you get to
your first set of traffic lights and there’s a mutation in that traffic light, it goes to
green – and it doesn’t go off green. So we know that in cancer cells there’s, the
cell division is out of control, and that’s how the tumours arise, so if you’ve got
the green light on all the way down, that’s the cell out of control. So the
checkpoints are not working and the stop signs are not controlling the signalling
pathway. [Image on screen: Dr Carolyn Williams gestures with hands.]