Lung cancer and inflammation: interaction of chemokines and hnRNPs

Chemokines play an important role in the inflammatory response. Recent evidence suggests that post-transcriptional regulation, through control of mRNA stability, could be an important mechanism of regulation of chemokine expression. Therefore, it would be important to study the role of RNA-binding proteins, such as hnRNPs, in chemokine expression after initial inflammatory response. HnRNPs have shown the ability to modulate inflammatory mediators expression by affecting mRNA stability of COX-2, TNFα and IL-1β and iNOS. Moreover, overexpression of hnRNPs has been reported in cancer, for example, hnRNP A2/B1 in lung cancer. Thus, investigating the role of hnRNPs in chemokine expression may allow us to understand the molecular mechanisms involved in the regulation of the inflammatory response before its progression to chronic inflammation and/or tumor development.