Where it comes from
- Made in
- Sparse in normal adult tissue; high in prostate, breast and lung cancers and in the developing brain
- Sent out by
- Mostly intracellular
- Acts on
- Actin
- Motile cancer cells
What it does
- Speeds cell migration, so cancer cells that make it spread
- A marker that distinguishes aggressive from indolent prostate cancer in research
- Function in healthy tissue unknown
In medicine
- A research marker only: in the paper that named it, human prostate tumours made more of it as the Gleason grade rose, and blocking it slowed the most motile rat cancer cells 1
- No medicine, and no test using it has entered clinical use
Beyond the body’s own use
- Not a treatment and not in trials. What is asked of it is whether it could grade a prostate cancer better than the measures already in use, which matters because most prostate cancers never need treating 1
- Two nearly identical genes on the X chromosome make it, so an assay cannot easily say which of them a sample came from, and what it does in healthy tissue is still unknown
Sources
This card describes what a medicine is for and what the evidence says; it recommends nothing. Talk to your clinician about anything you read here.