Cycles of Cell Death, Proliferation Key To Liver Cancer

Liver Cancer Cause

Research at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine shows that liver cancer is likely caused by cycles of liver cell death and renewal.

The research, appearing online the week of June 19 in advance of publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscores the importance of JNK1-mediated cell death and compensatory proliferation. The findings by Michael Karin, Ph.D., professor pharmacology in UCSD's Laboratory of Gene Regulation and Signal Transduction, and colleagues strongly suggest that the control of tissue renewal through the IKK and JNK pathways plays a key role in liver cancer in mouse models.

One link between inflammation and cancer is known to involve the NF-kB pathway, which regulates gene expression. In research published in the journal Cell in 2005, Karin and his colleagues at UCSD implicated the pathway's activator, IKK , in chemically induced liver cancer. However, the surprising outcome of those studies was the finding that while NF-