Metallopanstimulin

Metallopanstimulin or "MPS" was first described by J. Alberto Fernandez-Pol, MD in his Journal of Biological Chemistry report in 1993. There have been limited yet increasing citations of this 9.8 kDa protein since. It is reported to be a DNA repair, zinc finger protein involved in oncogenesis. Its expression is increased in over 30 types of malignancy and MPS levels have been observed to drop with treatment of some cancers. Besides its potential as a marker for some cancers, it has been used as a target for some novel chemotherapies. These therapies aim to chelate out the zinc from the zinc finger motif of the MPS, thus yielding it inactive. These therapies have shown promise for the treatment of cancer in laboratory experiments and some limited clinical trials. Head and neck cancer transfected to overexpress this protein have demonstrated suppressed growth.