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Drugs and Pharmaceuticals News
PRESS RELEASE:
Scientists Rediscover Gene Target for Cancer Therapy
Tue, 15 Dec 2009, 12:10:59 EST
SAN MARINO, Calif., Dec. 15 (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) -- Epeius Biotechnologies
Corporation, an emerging leader in the field of targeted genetic medicine, gained
international validation of the cutting-edge science behind its lead oncology product,
Rexin-G®, when scientists around the world rediscovered the Cyclin G1 gene to be a
major locus of cancer pathogenesis and disease progression, and thus a prime target
for anti-cancer therapies. Recently, scientists at the NIH National Cancer Institute
investigating the role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in tumor development and their utility to
serve as biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and prognosis identified one particular species
of miRNA (designated miR-122) that was linked to both the development and the
aggressiveness of liver cancer (Coulouran et al., Oncogene, 2009).
While microRNAs are natural negative regulators of protein coding genes, miR-122 is
characteristically suppressed in hepatocelluar carcinomas, and conversely its "therapeutic" re-expression was found to reverse
the tumorigenic properties of the cancer cells in terms of growth, replication potential, invasion, and tumor formation (Bai et al.,
J Biol Chem, 2009). Scientists working in Italy and the USA, using miRNA libraries as probes in high throughput microarray
assays to screen for sequences that are dysregulated in human cancers, independently implicated miR-122 in the
pathogenesis of liver cancer and further demonstrated that the tumor suppressive action of this particular mRNA is manifested
through the inhibition of the Cyclin G1 gene (Gramantieri et al., Cancer Res, 2009).
The finding that the natural suppression of the Cyclin G1 gene is lost in cancer cells is not at all surprising to scientists at
Epeius Biotechnologies, who first identified the human Cyclin G1 gene as a proto-onco