EurekAlert! -- Recently, the potential of PPAR-? as a target for the prevention and treatment of cancer has been widely studied. However, the potential therapeutic role of PPAR-? agonists has been questioned, based on contradictory results. Studies using animal models of colon cancer found that PPAR-? agonists increased the development of colon tumors. This contradictory result was supplemented by a recent report using transgenic mice expressing a constitutive active form of PPAR-? in mammary glands which showed that PPAR-? signaling accelerated tumor development in mammary glands. The actual role of PPAR-? in cancer has been complicated by recent findings that PPAR-? agonists affect cancer cells independently of PPAR-?, and silencing of PPAR-? and a PPAR-? antagonist inhibit cancer cell growth. To date, the role of PPAR-? in gastric carcinogenesis remains unclear.
