Potential Target for Treating Many Cancers Found Within GLI1 Gene newswise.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newswise.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Scientists from the Stanley Manne Children s Research Institute at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children s Hospital of Chicago found that a region within the DNA of the cancer-promoting GLI1 gene is directly responsible for regulating this gene s expression. These findings, published in the journal
Stem Cells, imply that this region within GLI1 could potentially be targeted as cancer treatment, since turning off GLI1 would interrupt excessive cell division characteristic of cancer. From previous research, we know that GLI1 drives the unrelenting cell proliferation that is responsible for many cancers, and that this gene also stimulates its own expression, says co-senior author Philip Iannaccone, MD, PhD, Professor Emeritus at the Manne Research Institute at Lurie Children s and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. We established in living human embryonic stem cells that removing the GLI1 regulatory region eliminated GLI1 expression and halted its activity. Th