A new study led by Claus M. Azzalin, group leader at Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes- iMM and published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows, for the first time, that the cell's telomeres can set the damage threshold a cancer cell can sustain and above which cells cannot continue to divide and die. These results open new possibilities for cancer therapeutics.