• HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Thursday, July 7, 2022
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Cancer

UTSW researchers develop blood test to predict liver cancer risk

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
June 22, 2022
in Cancer
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

An estimated one-quarter of adults in the U.S. have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), an excess of fat in liver cells that can cause chronic inflammation and liver damage, increasing the risk of liver cancer. Now, UT Southwestern researchers have developed a simple blood test to predict which NAFLD patients are most likely to develop liver cancer.

UTSW researchers develop blood test to predict liver cancer risk

Credit: UT Southwestern Medical Center

An estimated one-quarter of adults in the U.S. have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), an excess of fat in liver cells that can cause chronic inflammation and liver damage, increasing the risk of liver cancer. Now, UT Southwestern researchers have developed a simple blood test to predict which NAFLD patients are most likely to develop liver cancer.

“This test lets us noninvasively identify who should be followed most closely with regular ultrasounds to screen for liver cancer,” said Yujin Hoshida, M.D. Ph.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases at UTSW, a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, and senior author of the paper published in Science Translational Medicine. 

NAFLD is rapidly emerging as a major cause of chronic liver disease in the United States. With rising rates of obesity and diabetes, its incidence is expected to keep growing. Studies have found that people with NAFLD have up to a seventeenfold increased risk of liver cancer. For NAFLD patients believed to be most at risk of cancer, doctors recommend a demanding screening program involving a liver ultrasound every six months. But pinpointing which patients are in this group is challenging and has typically involved invasive biopsies.

Naoto Fujiwara, M.D., Ph.D., Research Scientist in the Hoshida lab, and his colleagues wondered whether blood samples from NAFLD patients could reveal those at highest risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of liver cancer. In the new study, they analyzed samples from 409 NAFLD patients to reveal a set of 133 genes that were expressed at levels higher or lower than average in the livers of patients who developed HCC over a 15-year follow-up period. The patients were then stratified into high- and low-risk groups based on how much these genes were expressed. Over 15 years after the samples were taken, 22.7% of those in the high-risk group were diagnosed with HCC while no patients in the low-risk group were diagnosed.  

“This test was especially good at telling us who was in that low-risk group,” said Dr. Hoshida, who directs UTSW’s Liver Tumor Translational Research Program. “We can much more confidently say now that those patients don’t need to be followed very closely.”

The researchers also converted the liver gene panel into four proteins whose levels could be measured in blood samples for easier risk assessment. When patients were stratified into high- and low-risk groups based on these proteins, 37.6% of patients in the high-risk group were diagnosed with HCC during the 15-year follow-up period while no patients in the low-risk group were diagnosed.

Most of the genes and proteins found to be predictive of HCC risk were immune and inflammatory molecules, which points toward the importance of inflammation in HCC development. Moreover, the researchers showed that levels of the molecules changed in conjunction with therapies known to decrease liver inflammation and HCC risk, including bariatric surgery, cholesterol drugs, and an immunotherapy.

“This means we could actually use these panels of molecules to track how well patients are doing over time or to inform potential effectiveness of medical interventions to reduce liver cancer risk,” said Dr. Hoshida. For instance, the protein blood test, dubbed PLSec-NAFLD, is already being used to monitor the effectiveness of a cholesterol drug in reducing liver cancer risk in an ongoing clinical trial.

Dr. Hoshida’s team is planning to continue assessing the utility of PLSec-NAFLD in larger groups of patients around the world. They also say that in the future, blood tests could be developed to measure cancer risk in other major liver diseases such as hepatitis B and alcoholic liver disease.

Other UTSW researchers who contributed to this study include Naoto Kubota, Bhuvaneswari Koneru, Cesia Marquez, Arun Jajoriya, Gayatri Panda, Tongqi Qian, Shijia Zhu, Xiaochen Wang, Shuang Liang, Zhenyu Zhong, Amit Singal, Jorge Marrero, Indu Raman, and Quan-Zhen Li.  

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (R01DK099558, R01CA233794, U01CA226052, U01CA230694, and R01CA222900), the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (RR180016, RR180014, and RP200197), the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLDF 50028), a Uehara Memorial Foundation Postdoctoral award, AMED (JP21fk0210090 and JP21fk0210059), KAKENHI (21H02892), European Commission (ERC-2014-AdG-671231 and ERC-2020-ADG-101021417), and Inserm Plan Cancer and TheraHCC 20.

About UT Southwestern Medical Center

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 26 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 2,900 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 100,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 4 million outpatient visits a year.



Journal

Science Translational Medicine

Share12Tweet7Share2ShareShareShare1

Related Posts

Killing resistant prostate cancer with iron

Killing resistant prostate cancer with iron

July 7, 2022
Figure 2

Oncotarget | Continuous treatment with abemaciclib leads to sustained and efficient inhibition of breast cancer cell proliferation

July 6, 2022

New guidelines laid out to standardize swallowing fluoroscopy

July 6, 2022

Stem cells reveal underpinnings of rare immune disease

July 6, 2022

POPULAR NEWS

  • blank

    Telescopic contact lenses

    40 shares
    Share 16 Tweet 10
  • Oregon State University research finds evidence to suggest Pacific whiting skin has anti-aging properties that prevent wrinkles

    38 shares
    Share 15 Tweet 10
  • The pair of Orcas deterring Great White Sharks – by ripping open their torsos for livers

    37 shares
    Share 15 Tweet 9
  • Emerging Omicron subvariants BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 are inhibited less efficiently by antibodies

    37 shares
    Share 15 Tweet 9

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Tags

VirologyUniversity of WashingtonViolence/CriminalsVirusWeaponryUrogenital SystemVehiclesZoology/Veterinary ScienceUrbanizationVaccinesVaccineWeather/Storms

Recent Posts

  • ORNL’s Wagner, Curran elevated to Senior Members of IEEE
  • Study finds people who practice intermittent fasting experience less severe complications from COVID-19
  • Radiation for responsible recycling: A distributed, microwave-based method to recycle batteries
  • Thin mica shows semiconducting behavior, say scientists in new study
  • Contact Us

© 2019 Bioengineer.org - Biotechnology news by Science Magazine - Scienmag.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

© 2019 Bioengineer.org - Biotechnology news by Science Magazine - Scienmag.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Posting....