Strategy of eliminating Stat5a might reduce breast cancer cell survival.(Brief Article)

2002 JUL 11 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Sonia Nichols, senior medical writer - Murine model experiments suggest Stat5a gene activation promotes breast cancer. Researchers now think that by decreasing the activity of this gene, breast cancer cells could be eliminated.

Stat gene activation is comparable in human and murine breast cancers, according to a report in the journal Oncogene. "Similar to human breast cancers, a proportion of mammary adenocarcinomas in the WAP-TAg transgenic mouse model demonstrate constitutive Stat5a/b and Stat3 activation," described S. Ren and coauthors, who work at the Lombardi Cancer Center of Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

When the investigators produced mice with deleted Stat5a gene, they found that "hemizygous loss of the Stat5a allele significantly reduced levels of Stat5a expression without altering mammary gland development or transgene expression levels."

In wild-type mice with both alleles, tumor size was unaltered, but in those bred with modified Stat5a activity several elements of tumor presentation, including tumor size, number, and appearance, ...