Low levels of a protein, dyskerin, in skin cancer cells indicate that they are preparing to initiate migration to other organs and thus cause the spread of the tumor to other areas of the body. This is demonstrated by a study by the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, which has just been published by the Life Science Alliance magazine.
According to the research, tumor cells prepare to migrate by changing their metabolism to be able to consume lipids, that is, cholesterol molecules. This new marker may open the door to testing lipid metabolism inhibitor treatments in these cells to prevent metastasis.
Every year 74,000 new cases of non-melanoma skin cancer are diagnosed in Spain, a group in which squamous cell carcinoma is the second most frequent. The risk of suffering it throughout life ranges between 7 and 11% and its incidence has doubled in the last thirty years. In the case of squamous cell carcinoma, about 4% of tumors cause metastases. And there is no tool to advance.
Now, the study led by the IMIM-Hospital del Mar makes it possible to have a marker that indicates which of them are about to start migrating to the lymph nodes to reach other organs.
The researchers have been able to confirm the role of the dyskerin protein in this process. They have done so from samples of a hundred primary tumors from patients with squamous cell carcinoma. In those that metastasized, they checked with in vitro tests how certain non-coding RNA particles stopped expressing themselves and how dyskerin levels dropped, which is the protein that helps to stabilize them. That is, they indicated that the tumor cells were preparing to migrate.
“It is a mechanism that can explain metastasis, but not only this, but rather be a marker of the moment in which the tumor cell is preparing to migrate and start this process,” explains Inmaculada Hernández-Muñoz, principal investigator of the study.
Statins
In addition, the study “allows us to have a good model to understand how the spread of tumor cells occurs in the early stages of the tumor.” This way, “se opens the door to study whether people with higher levels of LDL cholesterol also have a higher risk of metastasis».
The work also allows us to verify how the treatment of the affected cells with statins, which are used to combat high levels of bad cholesterol, allowed lipid metabolism to remit and prevented the start of the metastasis process. At the same time, the researchers verified how this mechanism of change in cell metabolism also occurs in other types of tumors.