(Press-News.org) Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered what regulates an enzyme that is central to the growth of cancer tumours. This could be of great value to future cancer treatment.
Danish researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered what controls the enzyme that aids the growth of cancer tumours. These findings could be of great value to cancer treatments and has just been published in the renowned journal, Nature Communications.
The enzyme is called ADAM17 and it aids growth in cells.
"ADAM17 is very important to the growth of cancer tumours. It functions as a molecular pair of scissors, separating molecules from the cell's surface which then increases cell growth. The problem being that in cancer cells this growth is over-activated and so the cancer tumour grows rapidly and uncontrollably," Postdoc Sarah Dombernowsky explains. She is part of Associate Professor Marie Kveiborg's research group at the Department of Biomedicine & BRICK, at Copenhagen Biocenter.
Researchers from all over the world have long been interested in finding ways to restrict ADAM17 and thus inhibit the growth of cancer tumours. Among other things, they have tried to impede the process with different drugs. However, these drugs also obstructed other important scissors, which led to patients suffering severer side effects.
This is why it is of such great importance that Sarah Dombernowsky and her colleagues have now located a mechanism that controls ADAM17.
The cancer tumour cannot grow
"We have discovered that the protein PACS-2 plays a big part in the transportation of ADAM17 in cells. ADAM17 moves in and out of the cell, but it has to remain on the surface to be able to cut off molecules and thus further growth. We have showed that without the PACS-2, ADAM17 returns less regularly to the surface; it's broken down instead," Sarah Dombernowsky elaborates.
Thus ADAM17 is rendered incapable of helping the cancer tumour grow and it provides us with fundamental knowledge, which may be used to improve future cancer treatments.
"There have been attempts at developing a pill to inhibit ADAM17, only the patients became ill due to side effects, because other, similar enzymes were also affected. But if you inhibit PACS-2, you can, in principle, obstruct only ADAM17, which would enable us to inhibit the growth of the cancer tumour," Sarah Dombernowsky states.
Marie Kveiborg's group is currently conducting animal experiments to learn more about the effect of ADAM17-inhibition.
"We're currently experimenting on mice to see if the cancer growth slows down, and it is our distinct expectation that it will. In the long-term, we would like to develop something that through PACS-2 allows us to fine-tune ADAM17, which could then eventually become part of a more targeted cancer treatment," Sarah Dombernowsky concludes.
INFORMATION:
The Food Safety and Technology Research Centre under the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has developed a new method for rapid authentication of edible oils and screening of gutter oils. Authentication of edible oils has been a long-term issue in food safety, and becomes particularly important with the emergence and widespread use of gutter oils in recent years. However, the conventional analytical approach for edible oils is not only labor intensive and time consuming, but also fails to provide a versatile ...
It is generally assumed that marriage has a positive influence on health and life expectancy. But does this "marriage bonus" also apply to the health indicator of body weight? Researchers at the University of Basel and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have investigated this question in cooperation with the market research institute GfK. Specifically, they compared the body mass index of married couples with that of singles in nine European countries. The results of their study have now been published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
Numerous studies ...
Ann Arbor -- While the number of graduates from family or adult nurse practitioner programs continues to rise, student applications to pediatric nurse practitioner and neonatal nurse practitioner programs are falling. Yet there is capacity in PNP and NNP training programs and unmet demand for graduates.
Researchers determined that most of the child-focused programs have vacancies in each class, even when some class sizes have already been scaled back due to the downward trend in applications.
Their findings are based on telephone surveys of directors at all PNP and ...
Human impact on Earth produces a unique kind of biosphere
Changes to life may be the greatest for the past half billion years
Earth may be entering a new kind of planetary state
Human beings are pushing the planet in an entirely new direction with revolutionary implications for its life, a new study by researchers at the University of Leicester has suggested.
The research team led by Professor Mark Williams from the University of Leicester's Department of Geology has published their findings in a new paper entitled 'The Anthropocene Biosphere' in The Anthropocene ...
A new study of 33 Kepler stars with solar-like oscillations to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The 33 Kepler stars have been selected for their solar like oscillations and a set of basic parameters have been determined with high precision showing that stars even older than 11 billion years have Earth-like planets.
According to lead author of the article Victor Silva Aguirre from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark: " Our team has determined ages for individual host stars before with similar levels of accuracy, ...
Marijuana is the most prevalent drug in the U.S. Approximately 70% of the 2.8 million individuals who initiated use of illicit drugs in 2013 reported that marijuana was their first drug. Despite extensive research examining potential links between marijuana use and other drug use, the literature is currently lacking data regarding which illicit marijuana users are most likely to engage in use of other illicit drugs.
A new study, published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse by researchers affiliated with New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV ...
Using the Subaru Telescope, researchers at the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Russia and Kyoto University in Japan have found evidence that enigmatic objects in nearby galaxies - called ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) - exhibit strong outflows that are created as matter falls onto their black holes at unexpectedly high rates. The strong outflows suggest that the black holes in these ULXs must be much smaller than expected. Curiously, these objects appear to be "cousins" of SS 433, one of the most exotic objects in our own Milky Way Galaxy. The team's observations ...
New research from the University of Exeter has shown that the sexually antagonistic gene for resistance to the pesticide DDT, which increases fitness in female flies but simultaneously decreases fitness in male flies, helps to maintain genetic variation. The findings contribute to the understanding of evolutionary dynamics and have important implications for pest management.
The researchers used a genetic model and multiple experimentally evolving populations of the fly Drosophila melanogaster to test whether sexual conflict can maintain genetic variation. Their findings ...
University of Southampton scientists have discovered a link between coronary heart disease and osteoporosis, suggesting both conditions could have similar causes.
In one of the first studies of its kind to use a special scanning technique, researchers found that people with a history of heart disease had substantially lower cortical volumetric bone mineral density in their wrist bone (the distal radius) than those without.
Using a state-of-the-art technique called 'high resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography', researchers from Southampton's Medical Research ...
MELBOURNE, FLA. -- A new study led by Florida Institute of Technology Professor Ningyu Liu has improved our understanding of a curious luminous phenomenon that happens 25 to 50 miles above thunderstorms.
These spectacular phenomena, called sprites, are fireworks-like electrical discharges, sometimes preceded by halos of light, in earth's upper atmosphere. It has been long thought that atmospheric gravity waves play an important role in the initiation of sprites but no previous studies, until this team's recent findings, provided convincing arguments to support that idea. ...
