The researcher Zafira Castaño has discovered that the loss of a protein in the early stages of lung cancer favors tumor growth. This was the conclusion reached by this doctor at Biochemistry in her thesis defended at the University of Navarra.

As she explains, the study was based on previous programs of study from her laboratory, which showed that the αCP4 protein appears in the cells of the tissue lining the normal lung, but is lost in the early stages of lung cancer and in 67% of the tumors observed.

The new Ph.D. at Biochemistry extracted several cell lines from different types of lung tumors and introduced a sequence of the αCP4 protein to observe the effects. In some of them, she found that cell proliferation decreased. In addition, specifically in a large cell malignant tumor, she reduced "its ability to grow independently of its anchorage and invasiveness, two characteristics core topic for metastasis to occur".

Early detection

"Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality, along with cardiovascular diseases, both in Europe and in the United States, because it is detected at very late stages when the disease is practically incurable," says Dr. Castaño. "It is therefore necessary to develop new strategies to detect smaller tumors, biomarkers that make early detection possible and to understand the alterations that take place. All this in order to find specific therapies aimed at correcting these errors".

After doing her predoctoral research at CIMA of the University of Navarra, Zafira Castaño will work at research center Cooperativa en Biociencias-CIC bioGUNE, with Dr. Robert Kypta, who directs a unit in the capital of Biscay and another at Imperial College London. He will focus his work on prostate cancer.