A new Italian study on the role of inflammation in myeloma progression

Well, since I have a gazillion things to do before leaving, I was going to forget about blogging until next year , but this morning a mostly Tuscan-made study caught my eye, and I just had to write about it: goo.gl/77intB In a nutshell, the study proves that inflammation and the evolution of myeloma are closely connected. This is not entirely a surprise. I mean, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the word “myeloma” mentioned in the same sentence as “inflammation.” But I found this study amazingly interesting and worth much more than a cursory look. So I’ll do my best to report on it, considering I’m a bit distracted (by the above-mentioned gazillion things ) at the moment…Please forgive me for any repetitions, etc. This group of Italian researchers came up with and analyzed a short list of twenty genes, eventually identifying eight genes that showed there were clear differences between MGUS, SMM, and MM. These genes were also associated with MM patients’ survival: IFNG, IL2, CCL2, LTA, and CCL3, VEGF. The “bad” ones are the last two, CCL3 and VEGFA, which are linked with inflammation in the bone marrow microenvironment (BMM) and with a host of negative occurrences (MM cell survival, etc.). Bottom line: patients with a high expression of these two genes have a worse prognosis. And here is a very interesting bit of info: compared to MGUS, in MM these two genes were consistently upregulated. That means that they are not (consistenly upregula...
Source: Margaret's Corner - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Tags: Blogroll Source Type: blogs