Reflections

Follicular Thyroid cancer and new driver mutations New developments on thyroid cancer front this week. A research group from South Korea  published an article on the transcriptional and mutational landscape of follicular (FTC) and papillary thyroid cancers (PTC). The reason this is big news is that this is the first time when a comprehensive data is being published on FTCs. Comprehensive data on PTC already exist as it was published in 2014 . I am not going to discuss the whole of the article but there was few interesting points which caught the eye. One of which was that the authors proposed new driver mutations for thyroid cancer, of the many two of them are EZH1 (a member of polycomb group protein complex) and LKB1. The interesting part came from another group in Italy who published a paper in JCI  about role of EZH1 in development of thyroid adenomas. The paper describes the role of cAMP signaling from TSHR mutations which when combined with EHZ1 mutations lead t...

LKB1 conundrum: LKB1 in thyroid cancer LKB1 is a known tumor suppressor. first identified in  Peutz Jeghers Syndrome , characterized by general hamartomatous polyposis leading to the formation of multiple tumors at several sites in the body. Loss or inactivation of LKB1 has been shown in  lung cancer  and  other   organ systems  confirming its role as a tumor suppressor. LKB1 is known to act as a tumor suppressor through various different mechanisms. One of the important mechanisms being activation of downstream tumor suppressor, AMPK. AMPK in turn inhibits mTOR which is important for regulation of metabolic pathways in tumor cells. However,  recent evidence  suggests that AMPK might not be a tumor suppressor but  promote tumor growth  under certain contexts. There are reports suggesting both AMPK and mTOR to be active in tumors without compromising the action of one another. This is turn also applies to the protein upstream of AMPK, ...

LKB1 conundrum: LKB1 in thyroid cancer LKB1 is a known tumor suppressor. first identified in Peutz Jeghers Syndrome, characterized by general hamartomatous polyposis leading to the formation of multiple tumors at several sites in the body. Loss or inactivation of LKB1 has been shown in lung cancer and other organ systems confirming its role as a tumor suppressor. LKB1 is known to act as a tumor suppressor through various different mechanisms. One of the important mechanisms being activation of downstream tumor suppressor, AMPK. AMPK in turn inhibits mTOR which is important for regulation of metabolic pathways in tumor cells. However, recent evidence suggests that AMPK might not be a tumor suppressor but promote tumor growth under certain contexts. There are reports suggesting both AMPK and mTOR to be active in tumors without compromising the action of one another. This is turn also applies to the protein upstream of AMPK, i.e. LKB1. Therefore both LKB1-AMPK have now been termed as cont...