Gene therapy slows prostate cancer growth
The development and progression of prostate cancer could be slowed by a new gene therapy technique.
The androgen receptor (AR) has been shown to play a key role in the development
of prostate cancer by regulating genes important for progression of the
disease. A team of researchers from Imperial College London, Cancer Research
UK and Hammersmith Hospital, London, were able to stop this action by
fusing a repressor protein called PLZF with the AR. They transduced PLZF-AR
into prostate cancer cell lines using a virus as a vector, and found
that PLZF-AR silenced the AR-regulated genes and inhibited the
androgen-regulated growth of the cancer cells.
Jonathan Waxman, one of the researchers from Imperial College, said: “We
hope to combine, using this repressor, with existing cancer treatments
to help develop newer, more effective methods to treat cancer.” The
study appeared
in an advance online publication of Oncogene.
Prostate cancer gene
identified Researchers have identified
a gene that they believe may have an important role in determining
how aggressive
a patient’s prostate cancer will be. They found that the
E2F3 gene was present in 67 per cent of human prostate cancer cells
but
it was not detected in the cells of men who had not been diagnosed
with prostate cancer. Furthermore, the higher the levels of E2F3
that were detected, the poorer the patients overall survival was
found to be (P=0.0022). The researchers say that over-expression
of E2F3 is an independent prognostic marker of poor clinical outcome
(Oncogene).
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