PRL-3: a phosphatase for metastasis?

The PRL-3 phosphatase has joined the cancer arena very recently but is rapidly gaining interest both as a putative prognostic factor and as a therapeutic target for metastatic tumors. In this issue Guo and colleagues provide another key piece of information by showing that the catalytic activity of PRL-3 is required for experimental metastasis formation in mouse models. Here we summarize the current knowledge and discuss what remains to be done before PRL-3 could be considered as a target for diagnostics or therapeutics in the clinical setting of human cancer.

PRL-3 expression in metastatic cancers.

Purpose: Expression of the PRL-3 tyrosine phosphatase is elevated in liver metastases derived from colorectal cancer (CRC). We sought to determine the cellular basis of this elevation and assess the expression of PRL-3 in metastatic lesions derived from cancers of the colon and other tissues.

Experimental Design: We developed modifications of in situ hybridization methods that facilitated the study of paraffin-embedded sections.

New paradigms for cancer drug discovery.

Discovering drugs has never been an easy task. Traditionally, this task has exclusively been undertaken by large pharmaceutical companies that recovered their high research and development costs by selling expensive medications. Despite the huge amount of time and effort devoted towards drug discovery over the last decade, the successful therapy of cancer has been limited.

New paradigms for cancer drug discovery.

This article was previously published in Cancer Biol Ther 2(4):452-455. Discovering drugs has never been an easy task. Traditionally, this task has exclusively been undertaken by large pharmaceutical companies that recovered their high RD costs by selling expensive medications.