(ANSA) – ROME, JAN 10 – Research conducted by Queen Mary University of London, King’s College London and the Francis Crick Institute has identified a protein that makes melanoma, the most serious type of skin cancer, more aggressive giving cancer cells the ability to change the shape of the nucleus – a characteristic that allows them to migrate and spread throughout the body. The protein is called LAP1 and increased levels are linked to a poor prognosis in patients with the cancer. The study, published in Nature Cell Biology, team stimulated aggressive and less aggressive melanoma cells in laboratory experiments to migrate through pores in an artificial membrane that was smaller than the size of their nucleus. The aggressive cells came from a site of metastasis in a melanoma patient, while the less aggressive ones came from the same patient’s original or “primary” tumor.
Imaging conducted after the migration experiments showed that aggressive cells were able to move through pores more efficiently than less aggressive ones by forming bulges at the edge of their nucleus. Genetic analyzes of the melanoma cells revealed that the aggressive cells that formed these bumps contained higher levels of the LAP1 protein, which is found within the membrane surrounding the nucleus (called the nuclear envelope). “Currently there are no drugs that directly target LAP1, so looking to the future we would like to investigate ways to target this protein and the nuclear envelope swelling, to see if it is possible to block this,” concludes lead author Jeremy Carlton. mechanism of melanoma progression”.
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