Researchers at McMaster University, the Cleveland Clinic, and Case CCC—including Molecular Oncology Program member Shideng Bao, PhD—discovered that a protein long associated with Alzheimer’s disease also helps lung cancer spread to the brain.
Published in Science Translational Medicine, the collaborative study used a cutting-edge gene activation technique to activate thousands of genes one by one in lung cancer cells and put those modified cells into mice. What happened when the protein BACE1 was switched on? The cancer cells were more likely to spread to the brain, showing that BACE1 plays a significant role in the development of brain metastases in people with lung cancer.
This discovery offers hope that existing Alzheimer’s drugs could potentially be used to help prevent cancer from metastasizing.