One common type of cancer is prostate cancer. The distinction between those with an aggressive form of cancer and those without it may now be made more quickly and simply thanks to research.
In Sweden, prostate cancer affects more men than any other type of cancer. There is now a quicker and simpler technique to tell who has an aggressive form of cancer and who does not, according to researchers at Ume University in Sweden.
In Sweden, more than 10,000 men receive a prostate cancer diagnosis each year. 2,300 of those lives can’t be saved, however many others can be treated or even have benign tumours.
Research is being done to improve the techniques used to discriminate between cancers that need to be treated and tumours that may be ignored. At the Department of Medical Biosciences, the research team led by Professor Maréne Landström is hard at work looking into just that. They have also worked together on this topic with a research team from Uppsala University.
“This may have great implications on precision medicine when treating prostate cancer, and on more cancer groups alike,” says Maréne Landström, Professor of Pathology at Umeå University.
The transforming growth factor beta (TGF-) signalling pathway is an important system that influences how cancer cells grow and spread, and the Ume researchers have now uncovered a novel function in certain proteins in this pathway. The discovery makes it feasible to identify the men who are at risk of acquiring aggressive and life-threatening prostate cancer more readily, faster, and early in the course of the disease, which may have significant consequences for the treatment of cancer.
Jie Song, first author of the publication in EBioMedicine says,”Our discovery is a breakthrough in cancer research in the field of TGF-β signalling. We have discovered that AURKB, which is a kinase usually overexpressed in cancer cells, interacts with TβRI during cell division of both prostate cancer cells and neuroblastoma cells, which is a form of cancer common in children. We have also shown that TRAF6 — an enzyme which causes so-called K63-linked polyubiquitination — ubiquitinates AURKB on two amino acids and thereby contributes to the kinase activity of AURKB when cancer cells proliferate. By in situ PLA technique, we show that K63-linked polyubiquitination of AURKB is present in lung adenocarcinoma, prostate cancer and clear cell renal cell carcinoma in patient tissue sections. Moreover, the AURKB-TβRI complex is correlated with the malignancy of prostate cancer. Our results suggest that the AURKB-TβRI complex may be a useful biomarker for early detection of advanced prostate cancer, which may be of huge clinical benefit in the development of precision drugs for treating prostate cancer,” she says.
Because of the rarity of this discovery, the researchers have enlisted more researchers to join their team and submitted a patent application through the pharmaceutical development business MetaCurUm Biotech AB. According to Maréne Landström, she want to truly reach out to the medical community with this news because she believe it will be very beneficial to both cancer sufferers and the medical community as a whole. To create a technique that the medical services can employ, they’ll submit financing requests to innovation organisations like Vinnova and others.
Maréne Landström said that they anticipate needing two to three years to create a test research findings.
Parvathy Sukumaran 
