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Molecular and functional characterization of lung cancer initiating cells

Cattani, Rebecka (2023) MOBM02 20231
Degree Projects in Molecular Biology
Popular Abstract
Lung cancer is one of the most aggressive diseases in the whole world, claiming millions of people each year. Nobody has yet found a successful cure for it and, therefore, there is an urgent need for more research to discover how patients could be saved. Lung cancer is so hard to diagnose since it grows quietly and it’s often detected when it has spread to other organs, meaning that it has invaded too much of the body and it’s too late to treat. What causes lung cancer is different types of pollutants in the air, smoke, and other toxins but it is not known yet which cells in the lung tissue are mostly affected by these factors. The treatment that is currently available for lung cancer patients is mostly chemotherapy. This type of treatment... (More)
Lung cancer is one of the most aggressive diseases in the whole world, claiming millions of people each year. Nobody has yet found a successful cure for it and, therefore, there is an urgent need for more research to discover how patients could be saved. Lung cancer is so hard to diagnose since it grows quietly and it’s often detected when it has spread to other organs, meaning that it has invaded too much of the body and it’s too late to treat. What causes lung cancer is different types of pollutants in the air, smoke, and other toxins but it is not known yet which cells in the lung tissue are mostly affected by these factors. The treatment that is currently available for lung cancer patients is mostly chemotherapy. This type of treatment is usually quite general, affecting the whole body and not only the diseased part. This is why there is a need to find more targeting treatments that act on the cancer only.

What we did was try to find which cells start the development of lung cancer and to analyze these in regard to all the things that cancer does, for instance invade or grow a lot. The aim with this was that, in the future, we could look into each lung cancer patient and see if they have those cells that start the tumor, and treat the cells specifically, so that the patients wouldn’t get a lot of side effects. To fulfill our aim, we took tumor and healthy pieces from patients with lung cancer and then broke them up until we got individual cells that formed those little sections of tissue. Every cell was then analyzed and computationally clumped together based on the genes that they had in common. Later on, every clump of cells that came from the tumor piece was compared to the clump of cells that came from the healthy piece to see which genes differed. The genes that we found were different between healthy and tumor, when compared between each other. Also, we discovered that there were 106 genes that conserved in all tumors.

In this project we decided to analyze 5 of these 106 genes, since it had been previously shown that they were important in other tumor types. To analyze their function in the development of lung cancer, we decided to use different drugs that would “turn off” these genes. We would then observe the cancer cells that we had treated and see what would happen to them, whether they would grow or change, for instance.

With our initial results, we could show that one of the genes we looked at, had a role in cancer cell growth. For the other genes we could not give a conclusive answer since different analyzing methodologies had to be perfected and the experiments have to be repeated. We will continue to make our research move forward and we hope to be able to produce some successful results. This work could be the base for future drug screenings that will hopefully produce targeted therapies. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Cattani, Rebecka
supervisor
organization
course
MOBM02 20231
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
language
English
id
9140676
date added to LUP
2023-10-31 13:14:51
date last changed
2023-10-31 13:14:51
@misc{9140676,
  author       = {{Cattani, Rebecka}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Molecular and functional characterization of lung cancer initiating cells}},
  year         = {{2023}},
}