While new treatments like immunotherapies and targeted treatments are helping to improve survival rates for lung cancer, we still need to find new ways to tackle this devastating disease. Thanks to our Curestarters, Dr Alejandro Vaquero and his team in Spain have made a breakthrough that has added a 'crucial piece of information' to the lung cancer puzzle. They believe this exciting finding will help to open up important possibilities for designing new lung cancer treatments.
We believe that our work paves the way for the identification of novel therapeutic approaches for lung cancer which will significantly improve the quality of life and extend the survival of patients in the future. Your support is not just funding research, it’s fueling discoveries that bring us closer to better treatments and, ultimately, a cure. Thank you for being an integral part of this journey. Your contributions truly make a difference!
Dr Vaquero and his team have been studying a tiny protein called SIRT7, which is found in many types of cell - both cancerous and healthy. It usually sits in the nucleus, which you may have heard referred to as the 'command centre' of the cell.
Previously, scientists knew that SIRT7 was part of a huge, messy network of proteins and molecules that all work together to keep cancer cells growing, making it a viable target for lung cancer treatments. But without understanding exactly what role it played, those treatments were never as effective as hoped.
Dr Vaquero's team found that SIRT7 interacts with another important protein that usually works to suppress cancer tumours. The interaction with SIRT7 causes this second protein to degrade, which prevents it from doing its important work to stop tumours - suggesting that targeting just this one single point in the network of proteins connected to SIRT7 could be hugely effective.
Researchers now need to carry out many more experiments to further explore the potential of SIRT7 as a target for lung cancer drugs, and find out exactly how it interacts with other proteins.
But this crucial finding helps us understand the issues with current lung cancer treatments, and puts us on the right path towards new, better ones.
This type of discovery research provides the vital first step in making new treatments a reality.
If further studies are successful, this work could one day lead to ground-breaking new strategies for treating people with lung cancer, offering much-needed hope to the millions of people affected around the world.
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2.4mpeople worldwide were diagnosed with lung cancer in 2022 and... -
19%of cancer deaths were caused by the disease, making it the... -
#1cancer diagnosed, and the most common cause of cancer death. -
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