A team of researchers from the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has discovered that a transcription factor, TOX2, was aberrantly increased in patients with Natural killer/T-cell lymphoma (NKTL).
The increased TOX2 level leads to the growth and spread of NKTL, as well as the overproduction of PRL-3 – an oncogenic phosphatase that is a known key player in the survival and metastasis of several other types of cancers. This discovery presents a potential novel therapeutic target to treat NKTL.
Findings are reported in a paper published in the scientific journal Molecular Cancer.
Their findings also show the involvement of TOX2 and PRL-3 in NKTL. These findings were validated in both cell lines and in a large set of patient tumor samples. In addition, the team analyzed the clinical features of 42 NKTL cases in an independent cohort and found that TOX2 was not only overexpressed in NKTL primary tumors, but also negatively associated with patient survival.
