Urea dysfunctions in the liver may signal cancer

A new study, now published in the journal Cell, suggests that the way in which the human body processes nitrogen may be key to finding new ways of detecting and destroying cancer.

Nitrogen is a gas that is vital for all organisms. Both plants and animals need it in order to make proteins.

When our body processes nitrogen, it generates a substance called urea as waste; the body later eliminates this substance through urine.

This metabolizing process is called the urea cycle, and it takes place in the liver.

New research suggests that dysregulations in the urea cycle could be a marker of cancer. The new study was led by Dr. Ayelet Erez, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

Studying urea dysregulations and tumors
Dr. Erez and colleagues altered the genetic expression of urea cycle enzymes in the colon cancer tumors of rodents and compared their urea levels with those of control mice.

The mice whose urea cycle had been interfered with had lower blood levels of urea and higher levels of a substance called pyrimidine in their urine.

The scientists also examined the medical records of 100 children who had been diagnosed with cancer at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center.

“We found that on the day of their admission to the hospital,” explains the lead researcher, “children with cancer had significantly decreased urea levels in their blood, compared with documented levels of urea in healthy children of the same age.”

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Finally, the researchers also analyzed large genomic sets in search of DNA mutations that could indicate disruptions in the urea cycle.