Cancer is a genetic disese. It occurs at genetic changes in the genes that controls cellular division, cellular growth, cellular death and the formation of blood vessels - either by mutations caused by outer factors such as smoking och radiation, or by congenital alterations. This collaboration between inperfect genes and environmental influence makes cancer a very complex disease. Uterine cancer is no exception.
Weak symptoms
Uterine cancer is the most common malignity with women in the western hemisphere and accounts for about five or six procents of all cancer with women in Sweden. But the symptoms are often vague, and we know very little about which genetic factors that causes the origin and development of this type of cancer. The need to identify these genes is therefore great, since it would allow the medical care the possibility to make a diagnosis faster and simpler and to develop more efficient cancer therapies.
Found gene signature
The researcher Sandra Karlsson at the School of life sciences in the University of Skövde has in her study used inbred rats to trace the defect genes that causes uterine cancer. The inbred rats are geneticly almost identical, like identical twins, which makes it easier the control the environment that the animals live in.
- More than 90 procents of the females in the study spontaniously developed uterine cancer. By using advanced techniques to analyze the genetic expression in the tumors we managed to find a gene-signature, that in the future can be tested to make diagnosis of uterine cancer in humans, says Sandra Karlsson.
The signature is composed of three genes. One has the function to protect the cell against free radicals. Free radicals are continually and naturally formed inside the cell, but may in overly large doses cause damages to the cell and to the DNA and are connected to over 200 diseases - from calcification and dementia to to reumatism, brain haemorrhage and cancer. Studies that Sandra Karlsson has made on human cancerous tumors has confirmed changes in this gene both in the early and late stages of cancer.
- This indicates that the identified gene have an important funtion when uterine cancer begins and developes, says Sandra Karlsson.
The dissertation Gene Expression Patterns in a Rat Model of Human Edometrial Adenocarcinoma was defended at the University of Gothenburg in the 19th of december. Supervisor was Karin Kling Levan, professor at the University of Skövde.