Rui Liu¹, Haiyang Zhang², Xia Wang¹, Hongli Li¹, Likun Zhou¹, Ting Deng¹, Rubing Han¹, Ming Bai¹, Shaohua Ge¹, Tao Ning¹, Le Zhang¹, Dingzhi Huang¹, Yi Ba¹

¹Department of Gastrointestinal Oncology, Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cancer Prevention and Therapy, ²Jiangsu Engineering Research Center for microRNA Biology and Biotechnology, State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University

Abstract

The conventional strategy for cancer therapy offers limited control of specificity and efficacy, study on the molecular mechanism involved in tumor growth and angiogenesis provides novel targets and drug-delivery methods. miRNAs have been reported to play a key role at each stage of tumorigenesis and are believed to have future practical value. We now demonstrate that Bim, which regulates cell apoptosis, is obviously down-regulated in pancreatic cancer (PaC) tissues. The repressed expression of Bim is proved to be mainly regulated by miR-24, thus promoting cell growth of both cancer and vascular cells, and accelerating vascular ring formation. By using mouse tumor model, we clearly showed that the recovery of Bim expression in PaC strongly suppresses tumor growth. Therefore, a new pathway consisting of miR-24 and Bim can be used in the exploration of drug-target therapy of PaC.

Key Words: Bim miR-24  pancreatic cancer  tumorigenesis  angiogenesis