A research team at National Taiwan University (NTU) has discovered a gene that curbs liver cancer metastasis and another that triggers coronary artery disease, the team's instructor said yesterday.
Lin Shu-hua (林淑華), a professor at the university's Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences and Medical Biotechnology, said her research team's discovery came from experiments with the "knockout mouse" technique, which uses a mouse that has had the function of one or more of its genes deleted or made non-functional, to study the correlations of genes and diseases.
LIVER CANCER
Lin said the team's discovery would help in developing new medicine and designing clinical experiments for liver cancer and cardiovascular disease.
She said that the X gene -- one of the two genes isolated -- helps curb liver cancer metastasis. Her team implanted liver cancer cells in mice, knocked out their X genes and observed metastasis and tumor clusters on them in the experiment.
The discovery might be helpful in improving the effects of liver cancer treatment if the correlation between the disease and the gene, which Lin described as "a guard" protecting the liver, is established through further experiments, she said.
In addition, the team found that the thromboxane A2 gene, or TXA2, causes coronary artery narrowing. The team's experiment knocked out that gene from mice, fed them high cholesterol food and found the percentage of coronary artery narrowing declined.
The team performed cardiac catheterization operations on the same mice and found that blood vessel damage was rare after the operations.
Lin said patients who receive cardiovascular stent operations usually have a 50 percent risk of suffering coronary artery narrowing following the operation.
LOWER CHANCES
The discovery assumes that medicine that curbs the TXA3 gene would lower the chances of getting cardiovascular disease, Lin said.
The knockout mouse technique has the greatest potential in the field.
Three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine last year for producing the first knockout mice. Oliver Smithies, one of the scientists, was Lin's instructor.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
Tourism in Kenting fell to a historic low for the second consecutive year last year, impacting hotels and other local businesses that rely on a steady stream of domestic tourists, the latest data showed. A total of 2.139 million tourists visited Kenting last year, down slightly from 2.14 million in 2024, the data showed. The number of tourists who visited the national park on the Hengchun Peninsula peaked in 2015 at 8.37 million people. That number has been below 2.2 million for two years, although there was a spike in October last year due to multiple long weekends. The occupancy rate for hotels
RSS