RAQUEL MUÑOS:  SATURDAY 01 APRIL 2006, 12:10

CD105 as target for anti-tumor immunotoxins

Raquel Muñoz, José Miguel Ferreras*, Tomás Girbés*
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Valladolid, Faculty of Sciences, 47005 Valladolid, Spain
* These authors contributed equally to this work

Recent approaches to cancer therapy deal with the attack of the new blood vessels supporting tumor mass rather than to the direct attack to cancer cells. The rationale of this is that since one blood vessel may supports hundreds of cancer cells, killing few vessels wall cells will allow the collapse of such vessels and therefore the destruction of all or a large part of the tumor. Additionally, the antiangiogenic approaches to tumor therapy circumvent also the problem of acquired resistance of the tumor cells depending on the treatment with chemotherapy drugs. Recently, tumor neovasculature has been targeted with immunotoxins directed towards very specific markers of the endothelial cells. One of such targets the TGFβ-receptor endoglin (CD105) is expressed in several mammalian tissues specially those related with the proliferation of new vasculature. A further implication of endoglin in cancer is that the plasma level of soluble endoglin seems to correlate with metastasis in patients with breast cancer. Immunocytochemical detection of endoglin seems to be indicative of neo-angiogenesis in some other cancer types. In the last few years a number of papers reported on the significance of endoglin as marker of tumor neovasculature. Therefore it has been considered as a suitable target for antitumor therapy using immunotoxins made of anti-endoglin antibodies and ribosome-inactivating proteins. The usefulness of some anti-angiogenic/anti-vascular immunotoxins containing non-toxic ribosome-inactivating proteins linked to anti-endoglin monoclonal antibodies will be considered.

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