Studies of Roles of SIRT7 in Cancer Biology

In Taiwan, cancer has been ranked first place in the top ten causes of death since 1982. The mortality rate and the incidence are rising year by year; therefore, there have been demands for improvement in cancer diagnosis, prevention, and treatment-related research and drug development. Since SIRT7 has the potential to be developed into an anti-cancer drug target, in the current proposal, we would like to know its role in cancer cells and anti-cancer mechanism. We hypothesize that SIRT7 is involved in regulation of oncogene functions, inhibition of autophagy, and mitochondrial functions. These features can at least partly explain the advantage of elevated level of SIRT7 in many cancer cells, and provide clues for why reducing the amount of SIRT7 can inhibit the growth of cancer cells. We believe that when the proposed experiments are successfully executed, we will gain a lot of information on the role of SIRT7 in the cancer biology. These results will advance the field in cancer biology and design in anti-cancer therapy.