Periostin and lung diseases: Recent advances and molecular structure modeling

Periostin is overexpressed in many epithelial malignant cancers. Although there were some reviews on the function of periostin related to a variety of cancers, a specific review on lung cancers is not found so far. Therefore, our brief review outlines the recent advances of periostin roles in the development of lung cancers/diseases and analyzes the potential value of periostin as a therapeutic target and diagnostic signal for lung cancer. We first of all searched for previous literature on a representative set of online databases, and outlined the works on periostin expression and lung cancers. We modeled the 3D homologous structure of human periostin based on computational prediction techniques. The resulting model passed the examination of a protein quality check. The fifteen most conserved sites were identified and forty-one active binding sites were detected, which can serve as potential targets for lung cancer therapy.