New and good news about the fight against cancer: a team of Spanish scientists has discovered that the TAU protein, associated with Alzheimer’s , could slow the advance of glioma, the brain cancer that takes the longest lives . What researchers have seen is that TAU is present in glioma cells with a protective function by regulating the ability of tumor cells to create blood vessels and therefore continue to grow.
Glioma is a rare type of brain cancer but with the highest death rates . These are tumors that originate in glial cells, responsible for protecting and caring for neurons. These tumors can have different levels of aggressiveness and up to grade three can be treated and lead to a patient survival of 15 years. However, at grade four, treatments are hardly effective and life expectancy plummets to about 15 months.
The results of this study, which has been published in Science Translational Medicine , show that TAU is present in less aggressive gliomas that are associated with mutations of the IDH1 / 2 genes and that its presence decreases as these become more severe. (associated with the EGFR mutation). TAU inhibits the transition to an aggressive phenotype by blocking EGFR activation. From this it also follows that the protein could serve as a marker that indicates the degree of severity of the disease.
As we said before, the study has also shown that TAU slows the ability of cancer cells to create new blood vessels through which they provide nutrients to more malignant cells. Conclusion: stop tumor growth. In fact, what has been seen is that the more TAU in a tumor, the fewer “aberrant” blood vessels there are. They are called “aberrant” because they differ from normal blood vessels.
Finally, the study points to the possibility of mimicking the protective function of TAU in gliomas using drugs that are already used to fight other tumors or even with drugs designed to treat neurodegenarative diseases.
Apart from cancer, the present work could open the door to continue searching for an effective treatment against Alzheimer’s. In this disease, the TAU is misfolded, it is not eliminated and it accumulates until it destroys the neurons. Could the discovery work against cancer but in reverse? That’s the idea.
The research has been carried out by scientists from the Functional Unit for the Investigation of Chronic Diseases of the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII), in collaboration with researchers from the Center for Biomedical Research in Network of Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED), of the Spanish Association against Cancer (AECC), the Center for Molecular Biology of the CSIC and the Hospital 12 de Octubre, integrated in the Institute of Health Research i + 12, Madrid.
