Monday November 09 2009 | Biotechnology feed | All feeds
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Monday November 09 2009 | Biotechnology feed | All feeds
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Apoptosis targets for pancreatic cancer Pancreatic cancer is relatively rare accounting for around 2% of all cancers comparing with, for example breast and prostate cancer which together account for almost 50% of tumors. In stark contrast however, while breast and prostate cancers are associated with an excellent 5-year survival rate (80%), only 2% of pancreatic cancer sufferers live this long. Consequently, pancreatic cancer has one of the highest cancer-related mortality rates. The poor prognosis of pancreatic cancer is due in part to its insensitivity to most treatment modalities. Specifically, pancreatic cancer cells appear particularly resistant to pro-apoptotic drugs. TRAIL is one of the more important endogenous mediators of apoptosis. Consequently negative modulators including the decoy receptors, TRAIL-R3 and TRAIL-R4 exist to prevent inappropriate cell death. It has recently been reported that TRAIL-R4 mRNA and protein is expressed at moderate to high levels in human pancreatic cancer tissues, but demonstrated weak to negative expression in the normal pancreas. This data not only suggests that TRAIL-R4 overexpression may contribute to the etiology and poor outcome of pancreatic cancer but that strategies able to block it's expression or activity may represent a novel therapy or adjunct for use in sufferers of this disease. Link to journal abstract:
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