NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Dec 15 - For growth and proliferation, ovarian cancer cells are "addicted" to a family of proteins produced by the oncogene MYC, according to research reported at the 48th annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology underway in San Francisco.
Importantly, lead researcher Dr. Tulsiram Prathapam told Reuters Health: "Our results suggest that inhibition of MYC and MYC family members will have significant therapeutic value in the treatment of ovarian cancer."
The MYC oncogene is amplified in 30% to 60% of human ovarian tumors, usually in the presence of extra copies of the MYC gene. In studying the role of MYC in ovarian cancer, Dr. Prathapam, cell biologist from University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues observed that MYC-amplified ovarian cancer cell lines are dependent on MYC expression for continued proliferation, whereas MYC non-amplified ovarian cancer cell lines are dependent on expression of MYC family members for continued proliferation.
"Strikingly," the team wrote in their meeting abstract, inhibition of MYC using RNA interference inhibited ovarian tumor cell proliferation only in MYC-amplified cell lines, and not in MYC non-amplified cell lines.
Further investigation revealed that MYC non-amplified ovarian tumor cells displayed elevated expression of other MYC isoforms (such as L-MYC and N-MYC) that rendered their proliferation independent of MYC.
The use of small-interfering RNA (siRNA) to silence all MYC isoforms led to growth arrest in the MYC non-amplified ovarian cancer cells, Dr. Prathapam and colleagues observed.
They also observed that blocking the MYC family of proteins in a culture of normal ovarian surface epithelial cells did not affect their ability to grow.
A logical next step, Dr. Prathapam noted, would be to see if MYC siRNAs block tumor cell growth in a mouse model of ovarian cancer.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου