A gene involved in cell division also helps fuel a deadly childhood cancer called neuroblastoma and could offer a new way to develop drugs to treat the disease, German researchers said.
The study published in the journal Cancer Cell found that a protein produced by the AURKA gene feeds a different gene called MYCN, which scientists know plays a key role in fuelling tumor growth in children with neuroblastoma, the researchers said.
"The MYCN gene is one that no pharmaceutical company have been able to target," Martin Eilers, a researcher at Wurzburg University in Germany, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. "Our finding offers hope we can make new drugs to attack this cancer."
Neuroblastoma accounts for 15 percent of childhood cancer deaths, with just a 40 percent survival rate, even though it only causes about seven percent of all pediatric cancers.
In August US researchers said they had found a variation in a gene called ALK that causes most inherited forms of the disease by helping cells proliferate. Out-of-control proliferation is the hallmark of cancer. Eilers and his team screened 200 genes dependent on MYCN in children with neuroblastoma and found that the protein produced by AURKA was key to the wild cell growth.