Pancreatic cancer remains a deadly disease in urgent need of newer therapeutic modalities. Pancreatic tumors are very heterogeneous and carry alterations in many critical pathways (i.e. harboring a robust biological network) rendering the design of therapy against a single pathway unrealistic. The disease requires a broad form of therapy that can target the activation of multiple tumor suppress...

  Background and Objectives: Some of the human papillomaviruses (HPVs) can infect genital tracts and are sometimes associated with anogenital tract cancers. HPVs induced cervical cancers through the expression of E6 and E7 genes by inactivating the tumor suppressor proteins. In this study, E6 and E7 genes were chosen in order to construct an expression vector which is able to express ...

Tumor suppressor proteins must be exquisitely regulated since they can induce cell death while preventing cancer. For example, the p19 tumor suppressor (p14 in humans) appears to stimulate the apoptotic function of the p53 tumor suppressor to prevent lymphomagenesis and carcinogenesis induced by oncogene overexpression. Here we present a genetic approach to defining the role of p19 in regulatin...

Methyl-CpG binding domain (MBD) proteins have been shown to couple DNA methylation to transcriptional repression. This biological property suggests a role for MBD proteins in the silencing of tumor suppressor genes that are hypermethylated at their promoter CpG islands in cancer cells. Despite the demonstration of the presence of MBDs in the methylated promoter of several genes, we still ignore...

Methyl-CpG binding domain (MBD) proteins have been shown to couple DNA methylation to transcriptional repression. This biological property suggests a role for MBD proteins in the silencing of tumor suppressor genes that are hypermethylated at their promoter CpG islands in cancer cells. Despite the demonstration of the presence of MBDs in the methylated promoter of several genes, we still ignore...

Gene expression and deacetylase activity of the class III histone deacetylase SIRT1 are up-regulated in cancer cells due to oncogene overexpression or loss of function of tumor suppressor genes. SIRT1 induces histone deacetylation and methylation, promoter CpG island methylation, transcriptional repression, and deacetylation of tumor suppressor proteins. SIRT1 may play a critical role in tumor ...

Autophagy is a highly regulated catabolic process that involves lysosomal degradation of proteins and organelles, mostly mitochondria, for the maintenance of cellular homeostasis and reduction of metabolic stress. Problems in the execution of this process are linked to different pathological conditions, such as neurodegeneration, aging, and cancer. Many of the proteins that regulate autophagy a...

Neurofibromatosis type 2 protein (NF2) is an underappreciated tumor suppressor involved in a broad range of nervous system tumors. Inactivation of the NF2 gene leads to neurofibromatosis type-2, which is characterized by multiple benign nervous system tumors and mutations in the gene have been demonstrated in many other tumor types as well. All tumors, regardless of location or grade, lack a fu...

Oncogenic viruses frequently target the pathways controlled by tumor suppressor genes, suggesting an extra function for these proteins as antiviral factors. The control exerted by the tumor suppressor Arf on cellular proliferation is crucial to restrict tumor development; however, a potential contribution of Arf to prevent viral infectivity has remained unexplored. In the present study, we inve...