BARCELONA, 3 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Researchers at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) have identified in a study “several proteins” involved in the progression of melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer, CRG reported in a statement on Wednesday.
The journal ‘Nucleic Acids Research’ has published the results of the study, which has had the support of the la Caixa Foundation, and which they have carried out experimenting with mice to verify that melanoma cells with reduced levels of PDIA6 had a lower capacity to metastasize to the lung.
PDIA6 is one of these proteins and the scientific team has determined that it promotes malignancy in melanoma by binding to RNA molecules inside the tumor cell and they have also observed the region on the surface of PDIA6 that binds to RNA molecules.
This protein has already been previously related to the progression of lymphoma, breast and lung cancer and they have drawn the conclusions of this study through the ‘RNA fishing’ technique designed in 2012 specifically to identify RNA-binding proteins .
This technique involves fishing out all the messenger RNAs in a cell and isolating and identifying the proteins bound to them, which informs the activity and diversity of these proteins.
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This class of proteins carry out a wide variety of biological functions, and in cancer, they confer resilience to cells by helping them to adapt to dynamic and threatening environments, promoting malignancy and resistance to therapies.
If future studies confirm that PDIA6 also binds to RNA in these other types of cancer, the results could lead to a common therapeutic strategy in different tumors.
In addition, the findings may help design new therapeutic compounds that prevent the spread of melanoma from the skin to other parts of the body.
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