Autumn 2015
Understanding Lung Cancer, Finding A Cure Lung cancer is the fifth most diagnosed cancer in Australia and the most common cause of cancer-related deaths. As such, it is vital that we find new insights into its origins and avenues for personalising patient therapy. Our genes – encoded as strings of DNA ‘letters’ – provide the instructions for each cell in each organ or tissue in our body to function. Genetic abnormalities that cause lung and other types of cancer are mistakes in our genes that alter the normal genetic ‘program’ for cell function and behaviour. Considerable research to date has centered on identifying abnormalities directly in genes that provide the instructions for how cells grow and behave, processes which are defective in cancer. However, the molecular machinery within our cells that ‘reads’ the instructions encoded in our genes is just as important as the message itself in determining whether cellular programs go awry and cause cancer. At the Centenary Institute, this key insight underpins our innovative approach to tackling cancer, namely to determine how the malfunction of protein molecules that influence how our genome is ‘read’, not just abnormalities in genes that directly provide instructions for cell growth and survival, contributes to cancer.
tumour and leukemia samples, calculating whether it is a predictor of patient diagnosis or prognosis. The purpose of this research is also to determine whether tNASP contributes to cancer formation, which would be tested with mouse models. It is anticipated that this project will lead to tNASP being used in the clinic as a new marker for determining cancer type, severity and patient prognosis. This will help personalise patient chemotherapy, thereby improving patient survival and reducing side effects.
Tackling lung cancer is an extreme challenge. It requires new and innovative approaches in order for us to better understand its origins and improve patient treatments. The Centenary Institute will continue to strive towards better understanding lung cancer and the molecular processes behind it, in order to achieve the ultimate goal – finding a cure. www.centenary.org.au
In this regard, research by Centenary scientists has recently showed that tNASP, a ‘chaperone’ protein that controls the packaging and therefore function of our genes, is inappropriately switched-on in cancer cells grown in the lab. Along with previous work, this finding hints that the protein tNASP plays a role in cancer in patients, promoting the growth or survival of cancer cells or directly causing cancer to form. What remains unknown, however, is whether tNASP levels are altered in tumours within patients or whether tNASP could be a valuable clinical marker for customising patient treatment. The Centenary Institute is currently seeking to fund a project that would explore this question. The project aims to establish reagents to measure tNASP and its molecular partners in patient tumour samples. It would later evaluate tNASP levels in patient lung
r Adam Cook, from Centenary Institute’s D Immune Imaging Group, is leading this research.
Research Australia grassROOTS AUTUMN 2015
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