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futurity_medicine 00094.txt

#Why cancer researchers are excited about this amoeba A type of amoeba that lives in soil has a gene that is very similar to a tumor-fighting gene found in humans. The human gene is called PTEN. When it s healthy it stops tumors from growing. But the gene is prone to mutations and those mutations are linked to lots of cancersin fact when researchers from the University of Iowa conducted a literature review they found that PTEN mutations show up in 40 percent of breast cancer cases up to 70 percent of prostate cancer cases and nearly half of all leukemia cases. If you look at tumors across the boardâ and that doesn t mean just breast cancer or prostate cancerâ you find that PTEN is the most generally mutated gene. And when you mutate PTEN in mice you cause tumors says David Soll biology professor and corresponding author on the study published in the journal PLOS ONE. While it s unknown how to prevent PTEN mutations Soll and colleagues became interested in finding out whether other human genes may substitute for PTEN like a player coming off the bench when the star has been injured. After some searching the team found that an amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has the gene ptena which mutates similarly to the human PTEN gene and causes behavioral defects in the cell. They also found a close relative of ptena in the amoeba which they called lpten that performs the same functions of ptena but to a lesser degreeâ a possible bench player in the amoeba s genome. The researchers hypothesized that ramping up the presence of lpten making it the star on the court could overcompensate for the mutated ptena. Soll and his team tested their hypothesis by placing lpten in a plasmid behind a powerful promoter designed to over-express the gene essentially cranking up its power. They then introduced the supercharged lpten into a cell with the mutated ptena gene. The researchers found that the over-expressed lpten gene fully overcompensated for all of the defects in the ptena mutant. If the hypothesis holds true for human cells it could lead to a new way to treat cancer. The researchers want to look for a drug that would activate the promoter for one of PTEN s close relative genes. Once a patient is diagnosed with cancer caused by a PTEN mutation the patient could take the drug over-express the PTEN bench player gene and potentially stop cancer in its tracks Soll says. That could save many cancer patients from undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment for breast and other common cancers. The finding has led the team to study other human genes that may be able to step in for the mutated PTEN gene and perform the same tumor-suppressing role. There are at least two close relatives of PTEN the researchers are currently studying. And nature might have put them there just for that that s the curious thing Soll explains. Somewhere there may be a backup system what we call redundancy that might be the basis for better identifying tumors and possibly creating cancer-fighting drugs. You have another gene which might be able to step in for the broken gene to keep things normal and that s what we re playing with here. It s very sophisticated. The Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank a national resource created by the National institutes of health and housed at the University of Iowa supported the study. Source: University of Iow

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