2019 CVM News: Key to rare aggressive liver cancer found in RNA molecule

This news item from the Cornell Chronicle is about: A boy complaining of a stomach ache is brought to a doctor’s office, only to learn he has an aggressive, untreatable tumor growing in his liver. This is often the case for people who develop fibrolamellar carcinoma, a very rare metastasis-prone liver cancer that primarily affects adolescents and young adults. This cancer accounts for 1-5 percent of all liver cancers, but was not recognized by the World Health Organization as a distinct disease until 2010. Now, a Cornell-led team has discovered that, at the onset of the rare disease, a small, non-coding RNA molecule – microRNA-375 – becomes silenced, a finding that may hold the key to treatment