Where it comes from
- Made in
- Keratinocytes, macrophages, brain, and most carcinomas
- Sent out by
- Shed from the cell surface by the enzyme ADAM17 (TACE) in response to injury and inflammation
- Acts on
- Keratinocytes
- Hepatocytes
- Gut lining
- Tumour cells
What it does
- Stimulates skin and liver regeneration
- Drives the growth of tumours that make it, an autocrine loop
- Shapes hair and eyelid development in mice
In medicine
- A tumour marker in research; the EGFR blockers used in cancer sit on the receptor it shares with EGF
- No medicine copies it, and nothing is measured through it in practice
Beyond the body’s own use
- Not a treatment and not in trials. The “transforming” in its name is a test-tube property: it let normal cells grow as tumour cells do, which is how it was found 1
- What it actually does is clearest in mice without it, which have wavy hair, curly whiskers and eyes open at birth 2
- TGFA has been studied in cleft lip and palate since the 1980s; sequencing it in 250 affected people found no clear causal mutation, only rare variants in conserved stretches 3
Sources
- Marquardt et al., Rat transforming growth factor type 1: structure and relation to EGF, Science 1984
- Luetteke et al., TGF alpha deficiency results in hair follicle and eye abnormalities in mice, Cell 1993
- Machida et al., TGFA: genomic structure and mutation analysis in nonsyndromic cleft lip and palate, Genomics 1999
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.