(Press-News.org) ANN ARBOR--University of Michigan researchers have discovered a biomarker that may be a potentially important breakthrough in diagnosing and treating prostate cancer.
Biomarkers in the body are analogous to the warning lights in cars that signal something might need repairing. In our bodies, they indicate if something's wrong or if we're about to get sick or if we're predisposed to certain illnesses.
"(In the context of prostate cancer) there's a big interest in trying to find biomarkers to discriminate between aggressive and nonaggressive disease," said Renny Franceschi, U-M professor of dentistry, biological chemistry and biomedical engineering.
Franceschi and colleagues recently discovered a biomarker that they believe achieves this differentiation. Prostate cancer can grow so slowly the carrier dies of natural causes before the cancer spreads, but the deadly form progresses very rapidly.
"If this biomarker does indeed control the growth of prostate cells, it's a new signal that's not been seen before and could provide a potential new drug target for prostate cancer," Franceschi said. "It could also be a potential biomarker to discriminate between fast and slow growing tumors."
The U-M researchers made the discovery in a roundabout way, said Franceschi, whose research lab mainly studies bone formation, not cancer.
"We discovered this regulatory mechanism in bone cells, but subsequently found it was also operative in prostate cancer cells," he said. "This is the first paper the lab has published on cancer."
The idea is that adding a phosphate group, a process called phosphorylation, to the protein Runx2, changes its structure to activate specific genes in both bone and prostate cancer cells--but with vastly different results. Bone cells need Runx2 and the newly roused genes to make healthy bone. However, in prostate cancer cells, Runx2 triggered genes that fuel tumor growth and metastasis.
"It's unusual that a protein whose function is to produce bone has this unusual function in prostate cancer," Franceschi said.
To test this, researchers inhibited the ability of Runx2 to be phosphorylated in cancer cells and found that tumor growth was reduced. Franceschi's lab also collaborated with researchers in Italy to analyze tissue samples from 129 patients with prostate cancer.
They found little or no Runx2 phosphorylation in normal prostate, benign prostate or prostatitis, which suggests that Runx2 phosphorylation is closely associated with the more aggressive forms of prostate cancer.
The next step is to establish an actual cause-effect relationship between Runx2 phosphorylation and prostate cancer. To do this they will compare prostate cancer formation in normal mice and mice lacking Runx2 in their prostates.
Worldwide, prostate cancer is the second-most common cancer in men, according to the World Cancer Research Fund International. In the U.S., about 221,000 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed in 2015, resulting in roughly 27,500 deaths.
INFORMATION:
Research colleagues include Chunxi Ge and Guisheng Zhao of the U-M School of Dentistry and researchers from the U-M Medical School, the University of Foggia in Italy and Centro di Riferimento Oncologico Della Basilicata Rionero in Italy.
The paper, "Role of Runx2 Phosphorylation in Prostate Cancer and Association with Aggressive Disease," is scheduled to appear online April 13 in Oncogene.
As part of the PlanetS National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR), astronomers from the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Bern, Switzerland, have come to measure the temperature of the atmosphere of an exoplanet with unequalled precision, by crossing two approaches. The first approach is based on the HARPS spectrometer and the second consists of a new way of interpreting sodium lines. From these two additional analyses, researchers have been able to conclude that the HD189733b exoplanet is showing infernal atmospheric conditions: wind speeds of more than 1000 kilometres ...
A new study indicates that vaccinating 12-year-old boys against the humanpapilloma virus (HPV) may be a cost-effective strategy for preventing oropharyngeal squamous cell cancer, a cancer that starts at the back of the throat and mouth, and involves the tonsils and base of the tongue. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study provides important information about HPV vaccination, which has proven effective against HPV-related disease in both sexes but remains controversial, especially in males.
Many western countries ...
This news release is available in Portuguese. Cancer patients are more likely to get infections. Pneumonia is the most frequent type of infection in this group and a frequent cause of ICU admission and mortality. A study conducted by researchers from the D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) in partnership with Brazilian hospitals and universities analyzed the factors associated with severe pneumonia in hospitalized cancer patients and suggests that more personalized treatment protocols can reduce mortality in these patients.
Until now, there was a consensus ...
Telomeres are short stretches of repeated nucleotides that protect the ends of chromosomes. In somatic cells, these protective sequences become shorter with each cellular replication until a critical length is reached, which can trigger cell death.
In actively replicating cells such as germ cells, embryonic stem cells, and blood stem cells of the bone marrow, the enzyme telomerase replenishes these protective caps to ensure adequate replication. Cancer cells also seem to have the ability to activate telomerase, which allows them to keep dividing indefinitely, with ...
Washington, D.C. - April 10, 2015 - Human norovirus may infect our canine companions, according to research published online April 1 in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. That raises the possibility of dog-to-human transmission, said first author Sarah Caddy, VetMB, PhD, MRCVS, a veterinarian and PhD student at the University of Cambridge, and Imperial College, London, UK. Norovirus is the leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ...
CHICAGO (April 9, 2015): The Affordable Care Act (ACA) allowed millions of young adults to retain health care coverage through their parents' insurance plans, but new research finds that many young African-American and Hispanic adults who need coverage for trauma care may not get it. The results of the study are published online as an "article in press" in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons and will appear in a print edition later this year.
Before the dependent care provision of the Affordable Care Act became law in September 2010, approximately 30 percent ...
Certain types of supernovae, or exploding stars, are more diverse than previously thought, a University of Arizona-led team of astronomers has discovered. The results, reported in two papers published in the Astrophysical Journal, have implications for big cosmological questions, such as how fast the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang.
Most importantly, the findings hint at the possibility that the acceleration of the expansion of the universe might not be quite as fast as textbooks say.
The team, led by UA astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type ...
Middle-aged people who are underweight (with a Body Mass Index [BMI] less than 20 kg/m2 [1]) are a third more likely to develop dementia than people of similar age with a healthy BMI, according to new research published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal.
The findings, which come from the largest ever study to examine the statistical association between BMI and dementia risk, also show that middle-aged obese people (BMI greater than 30 kg/m2) are nearly 30% less likely to develop dementia than people of a healthy weight, contradicting findings from some previous ...
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- Researchers at UC Davis have found that a gene, which is not active in some mothers, produces a breast milk sugar that influences the development of the community of gut bacteria in her infant. The sugars produced by these mothers, called "secretors," are not digested by the infant, but instead nourish specific bacteria that colonize the babies' guts soon after birth.
Mothers known as "non-secretors" have a non-functional fucosyltransferase 2 (FUT2) gene, which alters the composition of their breast milk sugars and changes how the microbial community, ...
BOSTON (April 9, 2015)- Making small, consistent changes to the types of protein- and carbohydrate-rich foods we eat may have a big impact on long-term weight gain, according to a new study led by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University. The results were published on-line this week in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Based on more than 16 years of follow-up among 120,000 men and women from three long-term studies of U.S. health professionals, the authors first found that diets with a high glycemic load (GL) from ...
