New Target for Skin Cancer Treatment.

• Position: PERROPTOSIS

Mutations of the gene MLL4 in epithelial skin cells can inhibit healthy cell turnover and may lead to keratinocyte cancers, which collectively outnumber all other human cancers. Targeting pathways altered by MLL4 mutations to induce proper cell turnover and death offers an approach to suppress tumor growth, according to a study from the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, published in the journal Science Advances.

The gene MLL4 is one of the most commonly mutated genes across all of human cancers. Previous work has shown that MLL4 is linked to tumor suppression in a variety of cancers, but its role in skin cancer was unknown. In order to uncover how MLL4 influences cancer growth, researchers knocked out only this gene in the epithelial tissues in an animal model and found that skin cells proliferated, the skin thickened, and a form of normal skin cell turn-over and...