Being diagnosed with cancer is always hard. Just the thought of undergoing medication and chemotherapy can certainly take its toll. But what's more disconcerting than having cancer, is having one that has no known cure.

NUT Midline carcinoma, or NMC, is such a cancer with no cure. Affecting anyone on any age, it usually targets the head, neck, or the middle section of the chest cavity.

Most patients who get this sort of cancer receive a combination of drug chemotherapy and radiation. However, fifteen out of sixteen who have properly followed-up on treatment have died.

That is why Olaf Wiest, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame, along with a research collaborators, is trying to find a way to stop the disease.

The researchers are studying the effects of the molecule JQ1, which is the one responsible for controlling the growth of NMC.

Genetics plays a key role in dealing with this cancer. Citing epigenetics, or the study of heritable changes in gene expression, Wiest said that there is a way of stopping the cancer's growth.

"The reason NMC is so aggressive is because these cancer cells divide very fast," noted Wiest.

Explaining epigenetics further, the professor said that its world is made up of three classes of proteins: writers, erasers, and readers which tell a gene when to activate and when to stop.

In this analogy, Wiest said that writers create the instruction for the gene, the erasers remove the instructions, and the readers control the group, issuing the start and stop commands.

The rapid-growth that NMC has is credited to the epigenetic reader BRD4, which interacts with another protein called histone. Their interaction changes the instructions for the gene, keeping the growth trigger permanently activated.

With this in mind, Wiest said that the solution is to block the protein. By disrupting the protein-to-protein interaction, it not only halts the constant growth command, but it also makes the cancer cells forget their instructions thereby making them resemble normal cells.

However, research on epigenetic readers is relatively new. What researchers have now is a vast amount of information on writers and on readers.