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Liver cancer – could reptin offer new hope?
A new development in the fight against liver cancer. A team at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) has recently shown that reptin, a protein present in the liver, plays a major role in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In fact reptin could eventually act as a target for new treatments.
HCC is one of the most common cancers and also one of the most worrying, generally with a very poor prognosis. Around 8,000 patients die from it each year in France and over 600,000 worldwide! Hence the importance of this study conducted by Jean Rosenbaum, director of INSERM’s Unit 889 “Hepatic Fibrosis and Liver Cancer”, in Bordeaux.
By comparing the different proteins present in diseased livers, his team discovered that there was an overabundance of certain proteins in the area affected by the cancer – reptin in particular, overexpression of which is associated with the most grave prognoses. Hence the idea of using reptin as a future therapeutic target. “We found that a decrease of the quantity of reptin in the cancer cells stopped them growing and caused them to die”, point out the authors. Further studies will be needed to confirm whether this protein could indeed act as a target for new anti-cancer treatments.
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