SOX17 Allows Early Stage Colon Cancer to Evade the Immune System

Researchers here report on work that identifies SOX17 inhibition as a potential way to attack colon cancer in its early stages. Any successful cancer must have adopted one or more ways to suppress the immune system in order to grow past the earliest stages of a few cancerous cells. Interfering in those suppression mechanisms is a potential basis for therapy, as the researchers demonstrated here. Whether or not this line of work will make much further depends on whether an economically viable approach to SOX17 inhibition can be found, and whether or not it is a good target for many other forms of cancer. Colon cancer usually arises in long-lived cells called intestinal stem cells, whose job is to continually regenerate the lining of the intestines. To learn more about how these precancerous growths evade the immune system, the researchers used a technique they had previously developed for growing mini colon tumors in a lab dish and then implanting them into mice. In this case, the researchers engineered the tumors to express mutated versions of cancer-linked genes Kras, p53, and APC, which are often found in human colon cancers. Once these tumors were implanted in mice, the researchers observed a dramatic increase in the tumors' expression of SOX17. This gene encodes a transcription factor that is normally active only during embryonic development, when it helps to control development of the intestines and the formation of blood vessels. The researchers' experim...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs