14 DAY TRIAL // Out of the people who develop life-ending cancer, 90 percent die because their condition metastasizes, as in the cancer spreads from one organ to another, non-connected, non-adjacent organ. In other words, pancreatic cancer may affect the liver, lungs or the brain, with an inevitable outcome. Once the disease spreads throughout the body, there is nothing to be done, and the patient dies within a matter of weeks. But Dr. Robert Weinberg, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and colleagues believe that microRNAs could be used to counteract tumor metastasis in the near future, e! Science News reports.
According to a new scientific study, accepted for publication in the upcoming issue of the journal G&D, the experts have identified the molecular mechanism that allows microRNA to have this amazing ability. The lead author of the study, MIT scientist Scott Valastyan, says that the paper is presenting “detailed mechanistic insight regarding the process of tumor metastasis, and identifies several key regulators of this process that might prove to be interesting diagnostic and/or therapeutic targets in breast cancer.”
In previous investigations, Dr. Weinberg's group showed that one particular type of microRNA, miR-31, was perfectly capable of suppressing breast-cancer metastasis. The team also discovered that the levels the microRNA molecule had in the body were directly correlated with a patient's chances of survival. According to their investigation, the tiny miR-31 molecule is in charge of regulating the expression of more than 200 genes, and the proteins these genes code for, implicitly. In the new research, the team has established that miR-31's influence on metastasis can easily be reversed by the addition of three targets in the body.
The groundbreaking find was that two of the three effectors regulated metastatic colonization, as in the way a tumor went about when occupying other organs as well. “Our finding that miR-31, integrin-alpha5, and radixin affect the process of metastatic colonization may be of particular interest in light of the fact that colonization efficiency is strongly associated with patient survival outcome in many human tumor types – including breast cancer,” Scott Valastyan concludes.