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A UTHealth Houston-led team has identified a promising new avenue to curb the growth and spread of tumors associated with hard-to-treat lung and other cancers.

The research is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by Xiaochao Tan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.

The team's findings build on its efforts to better understand the role of the Golgi apparatus in a specific subtype of non-small cell lung cancer, the most common type of lung cancer that is often diagnosed after it has spread to other parts of the body.

"The therapeutic options for this type of lung cancer are minimal. In this study, we were able to identify a weak point in this type of lung cancer," Tan said.

The Golgi apparatus is the part of the cell that modifies, sorts and packages proteins for delivery to other parts of the cell or for secretion outside the cell. Tan's previous work found that lung cancer cells have extra copies of an abnormal piece of DNA known as chromosome 3q, which encodes several proteins associated with the Golgi apparatus.

The current work identified a region of chromosome 3q that contains the gene encoding the enzyme phospholipase D1, or PLD1. Researchers found that lung cancer cells produce unusually high levels of PLD1 and—through the Golgi apparatus—send cancer-promoting materials out of the cell, allowing tumors to grow and survive.

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