Loyola University LogoIt is said that majority of the skin cancer are greatly treatable, but need surgery that may be excruciating as well as scarring. Supposedly, over 1 million individuals in the United States appear to be detected with skin cancer every year.

A new study conducted in Loyola University Health System may result in substitute treatments that could minimize skin cancer tumors with drugs. The drugs may function by switching on a gene that may avert skin cells from turning cancerous. This was mentioned by senior author of the study, Mitchell Denning, Ph.D.

In this study, experts apparently examined a kind of skin cancer, known as squamous cell carcinoma that reports around 200,000 and 300,000 new cases each year. Squamous cell carcinoma supposedly commences in the elevated portion of the epidermis, the upper layer of the skin. Majority of the cases seemed to grow on regions that are exposed to a lot of sun, like the face, ear, neck, lips and backs of hands. There appears to be a variety of surgical treatments, counting easy excision, curettage and electrodessication and cryosurgery. Getting rid of huge skin cancers could need skin grafts and be disfiguring.

Sunlight may harm a skin cell’s DNA. Usually, a protein named protein kinase C (PKC) is apparently generated in reaction to the impairment. If the dent is claimed to be too huge to mend, the PKC protein could navigate the cell to die.

Fit cells are believed to develop and split in a cell-division cycle. At numerous checkpoints in this sequence, the cell could halt in mending impaired DNA prior to advancing to the subsequent stage in the series. It was supposedly discovered that the PKC gene could be accountable for halting the cell at the checkpoint just sooner than the moment when the cell splits. In squamous cell carcinoma, the PKC gene is apparently switched off. The cell supposedly moves forward to separate without initially stopping to fix its DNA, thereby generating daughter tumor cells.

Denning is of the opinion that a group of drugs known as protein kinase inhibitors may have the likelihood to reduce the size tumors by switching on the PKC gene. Numerous such drugs have supposedly been given the clearance by the Food and Drug Administration for other cancers.

The study was published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.