Retinoid dependent growth arrest and differentiation in melanoma. (1st January 2012) - Gupta, Shobha
Retinoids are very effectively used for treatment of cancer like lung cancer, breast cancer, melanoma cells, etc. The pathway by which retinoic acid and its derivatives accomplish this work is still not elucidating. The present paper gives a hypothetic approach of retinoic acid dependent pathway of growth arrest in malignant cells. Besides retinoic acid receptor-b, the immediate target gene of RA is TBX2, which is also implicated in tumorigenesis. TBX2 is a target of microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF) which is also induced by Alltrans retinoic acid. This sophisticated role of TBX2 concomitant with MITF is mediated by targeting other genes, which are responsible for growth arrest. The interaction of these genes is shown in the form of an optical coupler as a hypothesis to elucidate the comprehensive action of retinoic acid induced TBX2 expression and growth arrest. The simulation is done in MATLAB Simulink and the results are relevant to the early-proposed model of Niles et al. (2003).