Gene-regulatory factors shown to improve pancreatic cancer response to chemotherapy

Researchers revealed that, in pancreatic cancer, the microRNAs miR-509-5p and miR-1243 can promote E-cadherin expression and thereby reduce the likelihood of cells undergoing epithelial-mesenchymal transition, or indeed reverse this transition. This ability to stop cells from adopting a phenotype linked to high migration and invasiveness was also shown to synergistically increase the cancer cell-killing efficacy of gemcitabine, which is promising for developing more effective combinatorial treatments for pancreatic cancer. …read more