Nat commun: discovery of neuroblastoma oncogene will help target new drug development

August 5, 2019 / bioin / - neuroblastoma accounts for 15% of all cancer deaths in children The survival rate of patients with high-risk neuroblastoma was 50% For the first time, researchers at the Australian children's Cancer Institute have found that a gene called jmjd6 plays an important role in the most aggressive cancers The study was recently published in the journal Nature communications This discovery opens up a new way for the treatment of neuroblastoma Photo source: nature communications knows that the increase of chromosome 17q is related to the formation of neuroblastoma with poor prognosis However, researchers have not found any specific genes that are important to neuroblastoma Liu Tao, an associate professor from the children's Cancer Institute and his team found a candidate gene named jmjd6 from the tumor database of 209 patients, which is active in more than one quarter of patients with aggressive neuroblastoma They shut down genes in neuroblastoma cell lines and animal models and found that this resulted in slower growth of neuroblastoma cells; slower tumor progression; and increased survival Importantly, the team, including Dr Matthew Wong, used a combination of drugs for jmjd6 gene expression in a mouse model of the disease The researchers found that after three weeks of drug combination therapy, the tumor size of neuroblastoma was reduced by 80% compared with the control group Liu said similar drugs used in their experiments are currently being used in clinical trials of other cancers, which makes this special treatment strategy more likely to be used in clinical trials of neuroblastoma Reference: Matthew Wong et al Jmjd6 is a tutorial factor and thermal target in neuroblastoma Nature communications 2019 DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11132-w