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It is hoped the discovery will be a new way to tackle hard-to-treat cancers in certain parts of the body.
Glasgow-based scientists seeking answers to the mystery of why cancer occurs in some parts of the body, not others, may have found a new way to tackle hard-to-treat cancers.
The team – part of the Cancer Grand Challenges initiative founded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute – focused on genetic faults which allow cancer to hijack signalling system in the body, which tells cells when, and when not, to grow.
Cancer uses that system, called the WNT pathway, to grow tumours in the intestine and liver. A new paper in Nature Genetics revealed that a protein called nucleophosmin (NPM1), which is involved in the control of growth, was found to be in high levels in bowel cancer and some liver cancers, due to the genetic errors in the WNT pathway.
However, by blocking the protein, the team found that it may be possible to develop new treatments for specific types of cancer which hijack the body’s growth system through this error.
Lead researcher on the project, Professor Owen Sansom, Director of the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and the University of Glasgow, and co-investigator for team SPECIFICANCER, said: “Because NPM1 isn’t essential for normal adult tissue health, blocking it could be a safe way to treat certain cancers, like some hard-to-treat bowel and liver cancers.
“We found that if NPM1 is removed, cancer cells struggle to make proteins properly and this allows a tumour suppressor to activate, preventing cancer growth.
“Increasing numbers of people are affected by these cancers, with some treatments unfortunately limited for some patients, so finding a new way to tackle these cancers is crucial.”
Researchers at the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute in Glasgow studied genes which can cause cancer, specifically looking at the bowel and liver, to discover why those genes only cause cancers in specific tissues.
Part of the SPECIFICANCER project, which focuses on why some cancer-causing genes only cause cancers in specific tissues, the fresh research found a way to target some of the genetic errors that cause hard-to-treat cancers in those organs.
Dr David Scott, Director of Cancer Grand Challenges, said:“Scientific breakthroughs like this demonstrate the power of Cancer Grand Challenges to bring together the world’s best minds to transform our understanding of how cancer starts and, crucially, how we treat it.
“By scrutinising the fundamental processes that drive cancer, we can tackle the disease at its beginnings, driving progress towards real-world impact for people affected by cancer.”
Proteins are crucial for the body to build structures such as skin, hair and other tissue, but sometimes the body’s messaging system goes wrong, causing tumours to grow.
This can be caused by mutations on the body’s messaging system, which then pass on the wrong instructions from our DNA, causing the cells to grow out of control.
The next step is to find medical treatments which block the production of the NPM1 protein. There are already existing treatments which can slow tumour growth so if a new drug can be discovered to target NPM1 in the same way, it could provide a safe and effective way to treat certain cancers.
