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Senior Citizen Health & Medicine
S14 Protein Receiving Attention for its Potential to
Treat Beast Cancer
Tumors 'addicted' to S14 and breast cancer
cells die if it is removed
 August 22, 2006 – Older women, the most often
stricken by breast cancer, may be hearing a lot about "S14" in the
future. This protein has been receiving a lot of scientific attention
recently for its potential to treat breast cancer.
William Kinlaw, an associate professor of medicine
at Dartmouth Medical School, has been working on the protein called S14
since 1990. Over the past few months, however, the news about S14 has
picked up. Through a series of recently published academic studies,
Kinlaw and his colleagues are ready to pronounce S14 a potential drug
target in treating breast cancer.
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"Over the past three years, we've learned about S14
and its role in communicating information about the nutrient and energy
supply to genes required for fat metabolism in breast cancer cells,"
says Kinlaw, who is also affiliated with the Norris Cotton Cancer Center
at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. "With this knowledge has also
come the understanding that most breast cancers have found a mechanism
to turn on the S14 gene."
He explains that these tumors are 'addicted' to
S14, because it is required for the activation of a group of genes that
allow the cancer cells to make fat. Kinlaw and his team have found that
breast cancer cells die if S14 is removed, and their analysis of human
breast tumors indicates that S14 is critical for metastasis.
"This makes sense, as fat is a crucial fuel for
breast cancers," he says. "We believe this is especially so during a
tumor cell's attempt to journey from the breast to other parts of the
body, because the normal breast tissue supplies machinery that allows
tumor cells to acquire fat from the bloodstream.
"Our data support the
hypothesis that once the cells leave this metabolically friendly breast
environment, the ability to manufacture their own fat becomes a
make-or-break issue."
These findings are supported by three recently
published articles. First, a few months ago, Kinlaw and his team
published a study in the February 1, 2006, issue of Experimental Cell
Research that further explored S14's relationship in driving fat
metabolism in breast cancer cells. The researchers discovered that if
you inactivate this protein, the cancer cells die. Because of this,
Kinlaw explains, S14 may be a new anticancer target for breast cancer
patients.
Second, in the July 2006 issue of Breast Cancer
Research and Treatment, Kinlaw and fellow Dartmouth researchers Bernard
Cole,
Peter Morganelli, Gary Schwartz, and Wendy Wells published a study
that connected the amount of S14 present in a given clinical breast
cancer case to the prediction, with surprising accuracy, of which tumors
would recur on long-term follow up.
The researchers used a special new
antibody made at Norris Cotton Cancer Center in their predictions. Kinlaw says that this study revealed the potential of S14 as a new
marker for prognosis in breast cancer, and experiments are now underway
to validate this result. Kinlaw has also tapped into the expertise at
Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, where students formulated this idea
as a model business plan for a class project for Gregg Fairbrothers,
adjunct professor of business administration and the director of the
Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network.
Additionally, the journal Endocrinology invited Kinlaw and colleagues to review the topic of fat metabolism in breast
cancer cells. In the review, which was available online on June 29, the
researchers present a new theory of breast cancer metastasis and its
relationship to fat metabolism and diet that focuses on S14.
"We're now working to examine this idea rigorously
in cancer-prone mice engineered to lack S14 in the mammary gland, and to
find areas on the S14 protein that might be suitable for attack with a
drug," says Kinlaw.
Kinlaw's work is supported by funding from the
National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
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