Friday November 27 2009 | Biotechnology feed | All feeds
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Friday November 27 2009 | Biotechnology feed | All feeds
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S100A4, a target for metastatic cancer Breast cancer represents the 4th most common cause of cancer related death in the US having claimed the lives of well over 1 million women between 1970 and 1994. High levels of mortality are not so much related to survival rates since breast cancer is in general very treatable. The problem instead results from a combination of high incidence and the lack of options open to those patients who fail first line therapy and develop metastases. Like breast cancer, bladder cancer has one of the highest 5-year survival rates. Approximately 70% to 80% of patients with newly diagnosed bladder cancer will present with superficial bladder tumors (i.e., stage Ta, Tis, or T1). Those who do present with superficial, noninvasive bladder cancer are often curable, and those with deeply invasive disease can sometimes be cured by surgery, irradiation, or a combination of modalities that include chemotherapy. Again, like breast cancer the situation changes dramatically in patients with metastatic bladder cancer and hence the development of drugs that prevent metastatic spread or progression represents one of the most promising yet challenging fields of cancer research. Metastasis-associated protein S100A4 (Mts1) is one exciting target. This protein induces invasiveness of primary tumors and promotes metastasis. S100A4 belongs to the family of small calcium-binding S100 proteins that are involved in different cellular processes as transducers of calcium signal. S100A4 modulates properties of tumor cells via interaction with its intracellular targets which include heavy chain of non-muscle myosin and p53. Recently published data shows that S100A4 expression not only correlates strongly with reduced survival in human breast cancer, but it is also associated with metastatic bladder cancer and the reduced survival in patients with metastatic disease. S100A4 therefore represents an exciting target for a growing number of metastatic cancers. Link to journal abstract:
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