Turning Back the Clock on Cancer Cells

Dahyun Kim

April 11, 2025

Every two minutes, someone in the world is diagnosed with cancer. Yet, despite the progress we've made, it remains one of the leading causes of death globally. However, as science and the medical field advance day by day, we are getting closer to a complete cure for cancer. 

In a groundbreaking development a few months ago, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced a new finding that allowed the industry to go one step ahead in this long journey. Professor Kwang-Hyun Cho’s research team of Department of Bio and Brain Engineering announced that they have successfully developed a technology that allows them to capture the critical transition phenomenon right when the normal cells convert into cancer cells. They analyzed the specific transitional phase of the cancer cell and analyzed it, discovering a “molecular switch” that can convert cancer cells to normal cells. 

So what is this “critical transition” that has been discovered?

Just as water undergoes distinct phase changes—like melting, boiling, condensation, or sublimation—at specific temperatures and pressures, cells can undergo a kind of phase change at a biological level as well. Critical transition is a sudden and generally irreversible change in the state of a system after it reaches a tipping point. It occurs when normal, healthy cells develop sufficient alterations in their genes and epigenes and shift to become malignant. These alterations accrue slowly over time, often unrecognized, until the point of no return is reached. When it does, the cell abruptly changes from a healthy equilibrium state to one of uncontrollable growth and cellular dysfunction—a hallmark of cancer. It is crucial to know this critical point since it offers a limited window of opportunity when intervention might halt the entire process of cancer development. Discovery of this critical transition point in cells could help scientists detect, prevent, or even reverse cancer development before it becomes too late. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) also reported that there exists a unique state in which normal cells and cancer cells coexist at the time of transition before transforming into cancer cells during tumorigenesis.

The critical transition finding helped researchers create technology for cancer reversal molecular switch identification, which is capable of reversing the cancerization process. Up to now, they have used this in colon cancer, and they have established that by using molecular cell experiments, one can restore the features of normal cells. It applies single-cell RNA sequencing data to automatically build a computational model for the genetic network that governs cancer's switch-like transition and to identify molecular switches for simulation analysis-based determination of cancer reversion so that reversion therapies against several kinds of cancer may be allowed in the future. This result is a gigantic leap forward in not only studying cancer but also in overall molecular medicine as a field of study.

This discovery verifies the idea that having the key to the precise mechanism of disease progression is the key to developing more astute, more focused therapy. While more study and clinical tests would need to be conducted before such therapy might be utilized on a broad front, the KAIST researchers' reports hold out new promise on the long, difficult journey to discovering a true cure for cancer.