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Inhibiting a protein could slow metastasis in osteosarcoma, according to scientists at the University of Manchester.
When he was in elementary school, Darrell Green lost one of his friends to bone cancer. Since then he decided to do something and studied Medicine at the English University of East Anglia. He has now presented the result of his research, in which he takes the first step towards a less aggressive therapy for childhood osteosarcoma, a disease with a poor prognosis with a treatment based on chemotherapy and amputation of the diseased bone.
For the 52.000 annual cases detected, there is only a five-year survival of 42% worldwide, due to the rapid metastasis of this type of disease at an early age. "It can spread quickly to other parts of the body and is very difficult to treat," Green says. "A quarter of patients already have metastasis when they are diagnosed, although it is detected later as an apparent localized relapse."
Less aggressive therapy
In the research, carried out in collaboration with the University of Manchester, they identified a driver of metastasis, MMP9, a marker "already known" but very resistant due to its rapid mutation. Then they looked for the protein that regulates it, MAPK7, and by inhibiting it, tumor growth was delayed in trials with mice. "This is a finding with potential to treat metastatic bone cancer," said Katie Finegan, a researcher at the University of Manchester and co-author of the study. "This work has discovered a new option for osteosarcoma, something we haven't had in the last 40 years, and we are already in the process of developing new drugs against that protein."
The little research done on osteosarcoma forced researchers to start "from scratch" to find circulating tumor cells and keep them alive to profile their gene expression. "We eliminated a genetic pathway that spreads cancer," Green explained. "If these findings are effective in clinical trials, lives will undoubtedly be saved and patient quality improved with a much kinder therapy."
