Originally published July 30 2005
Researchers discover link between a virus and liver cancer
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Researchers at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center have discovered a link between a virus and liver cancer that may prove to help cure other cancers, as well.
Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have uncovered a crucial molecular link between a viral infection and development of a common and fatal form of liver cancer.
In findings reported in the journal Molecular Cell, the researchers traced the pathway by which the hepatitis B virus (HBV) leads to development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and found that it "turns off" an enzyme known as GSK-3�, which acts to suppress tumor formation as well as inhibit the spread of cancer.
GSK-3� could prove to be the Achilles heel for liver cancer and other tumors - including breast, colon, kidney and stomach - that use a similar "pathway" to cancer development, the researchers say.
Hung collaborated with a team of researchers that included scientists from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Germany, Taiwan and China.
Infection from HBV is widespread throughout the world, especially in developing nations, and is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be a serious global health problem.
They also believe that this cancer is due to activation of a signaling pathway that includes a protein known as beta catenin.
When this protein functions normally, it sits on the outside surface of a cell and helps the cell stick to others like it in a tissue, but when it is found inside the cell's cytoplasm or nucleus, it works to turn on genes involved in cancer development.
What Hung and his team of researchers investigated was just how HBV results in accumulation and activation of the beta catenin oncoprotein.
In current research, they have created a super-active mutant of the GSK-3� gene at amino acid residue Thr 43.
By adding this gene into liver cancer cells, over-expression of beta catenin was downregulated, therefore, proliferation of cancer cells will be inhibited.
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