In their recent article on biomarker-based risk of pancreatic cancer,1 the authors analyse the potential value of Trefoil protein 1 (TFF1) as a component of a PancRISK panel. Our group has been long involved in studying pancreatic cancer.2,3 This paper particularly attracted our attention, because some members of our group have previous experience in the study of TFF1.4,5 In particular, we showed that copper binding, promoting the TFF1 homodimerisation, increased its motogenic activity in in vitro wound-healing assays.4 That finding appeared to suggest a possible activity of TFF1 on cancer cell motility.
In the same period of the publication of the article by Blyuss et al.,1 another article reported the anticancer activity of some copper complexes in pancreatic cancer cells.6 Due to the role of copper in TFF1 activity, we might speculate that the anticancer effect of copper complexes in pancreatic cancer can be due to a possible interference of the complexes with the correct TFF1–copper interaction.
We believe that these different pieces of evidence concur in supporting a role for TFF1 in pancreatic cancer, and that this topic can be worthy of further studies.
References
Blyuss, O., Zaikin, A., Cherepanova, V., Munblit, D., Kiseleva, E. M., Prytomanova, O. M. et al. Development of PancRISK, a urine biomarker-based risk score for stratified screening of pancreatic cancer patients. Br. J. Cancer 122, 692–696 (2020).
Rosati, A., Basile, A., D’Auria, R., d’Avenia, M., De Marco, M., Marzullo, L. et al. BAG3 promotes pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma growth by activating stromal macrophages. Nat. Commun. 6, 8695 (2015).
Iorio, V., Rosati, A., D’Auria, R., De Marco, M., Marzullo, L., Basile, A. et al. Combined effect of anti-BAG3 and anti-PD-1 treatment on macrophage infiltrate, CD8+ T cell number and tumour growth in pancreatic cancer. Gut 67, 780–782 (2018).
Tosco, A., Monti, M. C., Fontanella, B., Montefusco, S., D’Andrea, L., Ziaco, B. et al. Copper binds the carboxy-terminus of trefoil protein 1 (TFF1), favoring its homodimerization and motogenic activity. Cell Mol. Life Sci. 67, 1943–1955 (2010).
Montefusco, S., Esposito, R., D’Andrea, L., Monti, M. C., Dunne, C., Dolan, B. et al. Copper promotes TFF1-mediated Helicobacter pylori colonization. PLoS ONE 8, e79455 (2013).
Carcelli, M., Tegoni, M., Bartoli, J., Marzano, C., Pelosi, G., Salvalaio, M. et al. In vitro and in vivo anticancer activity of tridentate thiosemicarbazone copper complexes: unravelling an unexplored pharmacological target. Eur. J. Med. Chem. 194, 112266 (2020).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Writing—original draft preparation: M.C.T.; writing—review and editing: M.D.M., A.R. and L.M.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate
Not applicable.
Consent to publish
Not applicable.
Data availability
Not applicable.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Funding information
None.
Additional information
Note This work is published under the standard license to publish agreement. After 12 months the work will become freely available and the license terms will switch to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
De Marco, M., Rosati, A., Turco, M.C. et al. Comment on: ‘Development of PancRISK, a urine biomarker-based risk score for stratified screening of pancreatic cancer patients’. Br J Cancer 123, 1467 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-020-1013-5
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-020-1013-5
