Inhibiting HDSP for gastric cancer

Inhibiting or vaccinating against the microprotein HDSP, which is encoded by a non-canonical open reading frame in the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) HOXA10-HOXA9, could help treat gastric cancer by preventing its interaction with the transcriptional factor MECOM in gastric cancer cells, allowing its ubiquitination and degradation, and thus blocking transcription of the trypsin inhibitor and EGFR ligand SPINK1, decreasing oncogenic EGFR signaling.

Bioinformatic analyses of publicly available patient data identified HOXA10-HOXA9 as a lncRNA with predicted cryptic coding potential that was upregulated in gastric cancers. HOXA10-HOXA9 expression was increased in 70 gastric cancer patient tumor samples compared with matched normal tissues, and in seven human gastric cancer cell lines compared with normal human gastric mucosal epithelial cell lines. ...