SOUTH KOREAN SCIENTISTS FIND CANCER-CAUSING PROTEIN.

SEOUL, July 3 Asia Pulse - A team of South Korean scientists said Sunday it has verified that the growth and metastasis of human cancer is caused, in many instances, by the E2-EPF ubiquitin carrier protein (UCP).

The discovery, made by a team at the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB), is expected to expand treatment methods for the killer disease by verifying the process in which cancer grows and spreads inside the body. It was published in the latest online edition of New York-based Nature Medicine.

Im Dong-soo, the team's leading researcher, said his team has also engineered a form of short-interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA) that suppresses the UCP. The Ad.UCP-siRNA discovered by the team has been submitted for an international patent.

"In the past, scientists suspected that the UCP was linked to cancer, but they were not certain," the chief researcher said.

Im said that tests on live laboratory mice and human tissue samples showed a direct correlation between UCP, Von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) proteins and the Hypoxia-inducible factor one alpha protein (HIF-1 alpha). Human testing involved actual cancerous tissues removed from patients that had been preserved in paraffin blocks.

VHL proteins, which exist in every healthy human cell, prevent cancer growth, while HIF-1 alpha causes vascular growth to make ...