Posted on Wed, Jul. 29, 2009
Researchers may have landed another punch in the fight against cancer as Dr. David Levy and his team at NYU's Langone Medical Center, New York City, have discovered a protein with a function to convert normal cells into cancerous cells.
STAT3 was originally discovered as a gene regulator, meaning it would turn on genes in a cell's nucleus, often in situations requiring an immune response. Since the mid-1990s, Dr. Levy and colleagues have studied the protein and achieved their findings by examining it in relation to a specific gene that causes many human cancers.
Their breakthrough came with the sighting of the protein in cells' mitochondria, the cellular engines that produce energy and drive tumor development, as well as their nuclei.
"These results open the possibility that inhibiting the mitochondrial function of STAT3 could be a promising cancer therapy in the future," Dr. Levy says. "By knowing this mitochondrial function is critical, it may be possible to design therapeutic strategies that specifically target this function while sparing the other functions of the protein, such as its ability to turn genes on. Therefore, we would hope that inhibitors could be developed that would be highly specific for cancer cells."
Dr. Levy, a professor of pathology and microbiology at NYU, says more research must be done to ascertain the specific purpose of STAT3 in mitochondria and whether it has a similar role in other cancer-causing genes.
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