Funded Research
February 15, 2008: The Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative and the FOSTER Foundation are co-funding a 1-year $50,000 research study, "The role of CIP4 in osteosarcoma metastases," at the Children's Cancer Hospital at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Led by Nadezhda V. Koshkina, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, and involving Seth J. Corey, M.D. Professor of Pediatrics and Leukemia, this study is focused at expanding our knowledge of the metastatic mechanisms and identifying a new target for the treatment of osteosarcoma metastases. The following appears in the abstract of their grant application:
"The most common site of metastases for primary malignancies, including osteosarcoma (OS), is the lung. The best way to treat metastases would be to inhibit their spread at the earliest stage. Our long term goal is to evaluate the early mechanisms involved in the metastatic process in order to develop effective preventive metastases therapy. We recently identified the significant overexpression of CIP4 protein in the metastatic OS and breast cancer tumor cells compared with parental non-metastatic cells, which indicates on its potential role in metastases formation. Inactivation of CIP4 in breast cancer cells altered their metastatic phenotype in vitro. Our laboratory discovered CIP4 in a yeast two hybrid screen with a Src kinase as bait. CIP4 is a cytoskeletal scaffolding protein with an SH3 domain that binds N-WASP, which triggers actin polymerization. We believe that CIP4 regulates cytoskeletal assembly, which is essential for a variety of behaviors such as invasion and metastasis. However, very little is known about its role in cancer and until now the function of CIP4 was investigated only in vitro. Here we propose to investigate the role of CIP4 in OS metastases formation in vitro and in vivo."
You can read more about the approach they are taking in this study in their article, Novel targets to treat osteosarcoma lung metastases, which appears in the February 2008 issue of ESUN.