The college of pharmacy at the University of Baghdad has organized an electronic workshop entitled “The role of the hedgehog signaling pathway in the development of cancer” delivered by the lecturer Mahmoud Qahtan Ismail, a faculty member at the Medicine and Toxicology Branch via Zoom platform. The workshop discussed the role of this pathway which was first discovered in 1980 by Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Weischaus while examining mutations that change the body’s outline of fruit fly larvae, from which the this signal pathway derived its name and where the larvae characteristically clustered resembling the spine.
The participants in this workshop talked about the types of tumors where the first type was discovered in patients with Gorlin syndrome that is a rare, inherited disorder that affects many organs and tissues in the body so people with such an disorder have a very high risk of developing basal cell skin cancer during adolescence or early adulthood and they may be also at risk of developing medulloblastoma (a type of brain cancer) and other types of cancer. At the end of the workshop, the most important inhibitors of this hedgehog pathway were mentioned including: cyclopamine, fasmodegge and sonidegb.
