Cathartocytosis: A Novel Cellular Process Essential for Metaplastic Dedifferentiation
Abstract
Adenocarcinoma is the most common type of cancer in the stomach and pancreas. The prognosis for both of these cancers is dismal, with 5-year overall survival for stomach cancer being 31% and pancreatic cancer 9%, which decrease to 5% and 3% respectively with evidence of metastatic disease. Thus, there is a great need for new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. This research application follows-up on a successful multicenter, phase II clinical trial, where we demonstrated an antibody called Das-1 is able to identify pancreatic cysts that harbor high grade premalignant tumors and cancer with 88% sensitivity and 99% specificity. Here, I present data demonstrating that the reason this antibody is so good at identifying cancer is that it marks a previously undescribed cellular process turned on in precancerous and cancer that we call cathartocytosis. In this proposal, I aim to discover how this cellular process works. The results of this study should yield novel diagnostic as well as therapeutic technologies that we believe will assist in both the early identification of these precancerous and cancerous lesions as well as new strategies to treat these conditions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 10, 2021
- Source ID
- W81XWH2010630
Entities
People
- J. M. Brown
Organizations
- United States Army
- Washington University in St. Louis