Gastric, or stomach cancer, remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths, according to the American Cancer Society, because it’s difficult to diagnose at an early stage and treatments often fail once the disease has spread.

But a team of researchers led by Kishore Guda, associate professor at the Digestive Health Research Institute at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, found a special class of ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules — called long intergentic non-coding RNAs (lincRNA) — that may provide a new target to prevent and treat the disease.

The main function of RNA is to convert genetic information from DNA into proteins. Non-coding RNA molecules don’t carry genetic information that would later be converted to proteins.

“We discovered that a particular lincRNA, lincPRKD, to be activated in both gastric and esophageal cancer,” Guda said. “In understanding the role of lincPRKD in gastric cancer, we hope to uncover new ways to prevent and treat this challenging disease.”

Durga Ravillah, a senior research associate, and Andrew Blum, an assistant professor on Guda’s team, led the study. Their findings were recently published in the journal Gastro Hep Advances.

The goal is to determine how often this lincRNA molecule is activated in these cancers. They also hope to identify whether these RNA molecules are more common in any particular tumor subgroups using existing gastric and esophageal cancer tissues — and test whether they can be used to detect the cancer early.

Starting this summer, the researchers also plan to grow recently harvested cancer biopsy tissues from patients in immune-compromised mouse models and to test whether blocking the molecules can stop malignant tumors from forming.

“Since resistance to chemotherapy, immunotherapy and/or radiation is commonly observed in esophageal and gastric cancer patients,” Guda said, “we will also test whether therapy resistance is associated with activation of these RNA molecules.”