The simplest answer to your question is that telomerase extends the telomeres of a dividing cancer cell, thereby giving the cell the potential to divide forever. Something that most normal cells do not posses. Normally telomeres shorten every time a cell divides. When telomeres get too short, cells can undergo telomere crisis resulting in senescence or cell death. However there are many good research and review articles you can follow up with if you are interested in the topic such as the examples posted above.
There is a lot of new recent publications regarding telomerase that might be of interest especially those relating to ATRX, DAXX, ALT, hTERT promoter methylation and hTERT promoter mutation to name a few.
A brief below is from the 2009 Nobel prize for the discovery of Telomere cell biology. But what is fascinating is how telomeres are lost and the chromosomes become end to end sticky - strange translocations then occurs. An interest of many oncologists is how theses strange chromosomal arrangement occur and telomeric stickiness without cell senescence or apoptosis is a candidate event in the process.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2009/popular-medicineprize2009.pdf
With great pride and honor, we would like to invite you to participate in “14th World Cancer Convention” which is going to be held during November 21-23, 2016 at Dubai, UAE.
For details please visit here: http://cancer.global-summit.com/middleeast/
email us : [email protected]
http://cancer.global-summit.com/middleeast/
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