ALBERTA — A research paper titled "Active Beta-Catenin (ABC) promotes an invasive phenotype in pediatric osteosarcoma" was published in Volume 17 of a scientific journal on June 9, 2026. The study found that activated β-catenin promotes invasiveness in pediatric osteosarcoma cells.
The study was led by co-first authors Kristin Hinton and Saima Ghafoor, with corresponding author Sujata Persad, all from the Department of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. Osteosarcoma is the most common primary bone cancer in children and adolescents. Survival rates for the disease have shown minimal improvement over the past two decades, particularly for patients with tumors that spread to distant organs such as the lungs.
Activated β-catenin (ABC) is a highly active form of the β-catenin protein that participates in Wnt signaling. Previous research indicated that levels of activated β-catenin are elevated in aggressive osteosarcoma cells. Researchers engineered osteosarcoma cells to express either activated β-catenin or conventional β-catenin and compared their behavior in laboratory experiments.
Cells engineered to express activated β-catenin demonstrated a greater invasive capacity compared to control cells in laboratory tests. In contrast, the overexpression of standard β-catenin did not result in the same increase in invasive capacity. The study also found that activated β-catenin enhanced anchorage-independent growth in the tested osteosarcoma cells and increased Wnt pathway transcriptional activity in these cells.
Activated β-catenin-expressing cells also showed elevated expression of matrix metalloproteinases MMP-2 and MMP-9. While both activated β-catenin and conventional β-catenin activated Wnt signaling, activated β-catenin produced stronger transcriptional responses in the tested cells. "Cumulatively, these results suggest that ABC plays a role in OS progression, and this may be distinct from the role of β-Catenin." Hinton, Ghafoor, and Persad said.
The authors stated that therapies designed to block activated β-catenin formation or activity could offer a targeted treatment approach for osteosarcoma. They added that elevated nuclear levels of activated β-catenin may serve as a prognostic biomarker for tumor progression or metastasis. The digital object identifier for the study is 10.18632/genesandcancer.244.