Cancer Cells Restored to Normalcy Through RNA

And, crucially, they found that they could reverse the process, switching the brakes back on and stopping cancer. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in the US say their finding could lead to a new strategy for cancer therapy based on reprogramming cells back to normality. While this hypothesis was correct, how the behaviour was regulated was still unclear, so they looked to another protein (PLEKHA7) that maintains the normal state of cells through a set of miRNAs. However, in the case of tumour cells, growth grows out of control, which is a characteristic of cancer.

Led by Panos Anastasiadis, researchers found that when the usual sequence of cell regulation is disrupted, cancerous cells quickly occur and multiply out of control, but by adding mircoRNAs molecules scientists were able to prevent cancer. When this protein was lost, the miRNAs was misregulated and the cells became oncogenic.

So far it has only been tested on human cells in the lab, but the researchers are hopeful that the technique could one day be used to target tumours so that cancer could be “switched off” without the need for harsh chemotherapy or surgery. This article holds that when normal cells come in contact with each other, a specific subset of miRNAs suppresses genes that promote cell growth.

These adhesion proteins are important for normal tissue formation, and for a long time were thought to be tumor suppressors. This turned out to not be true, they said, because both proteins are present in and required for tumor growth. To answer this, the researchers studied a new protein called PLEKHA7, which associates with E-cadherin and p120 only at the top, or the “apical” part of normal polarized epithelial cells.

The findings of the UTHealth study are viewed as vital in the development of treatments for some of the deadliest types of cancers such as colon, lung and pancreatic cancers.

“We believe that loss of the apical PLEKHA7-microprocessor complex is an early and somewhat universal event in cancer”, asserted Dr. Anastasiadis.

Cancer can be listed as one of the most intelligent diseases that hit mankind.

Co-authors on the study include Siu Ngok, Ryan Feathers, Lomeli Carpio, Tiffany Baker, Jennifer Carr, Irene Yan, Sahra Borges, ,Edith Perez, Peter Storz, John Copland, Tushar Patel, and E. Aubrey Thompson from Mayo Clinic; and Pamela Pulimeno, and Sandra Citi from the University of Geneva in Switzerland.