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An explainable detection framework for health insurance fraud via temporal capture and confidence assurance
npj Digital Medicine, Published online: 08 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41746-026-03200-5
An explainable detection framework for health insurance fraud via temporal capture and confidence assuranceAuthor Correction: A mouse brain stereotaxic topographic atlas with isotropic 1-μm resolution
Nature, Published online: 07 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-11094-2
Author Correction: A mouse brain stereotaxic topographic atlas with isotropic 1-μm resolutionE3AD: An Emotion-Aware Vision-Language-Action Model for Human-Centric End-to-End Autonomous Driving
The Ideation Bottleneck: Decomposing the Quality Gap Between AI-Generated and Human Economics Research
Think Before You Drive: World Model-Inspired Multimodal Grounding for Autonomous Vehicles
SIRT3 deacetylates STEAP4 to modulate cuproptosis sensitivity via mitochondrial metabolic reprogramming in HBV-related HCC
Cell Death Differ. 2026 Mar 16. doi: 10.1038/s41418-026-01713-w. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection remains a leading etiological driver of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Cuproptosis is a recently defined copper-dependent form of regulated cell death that selectively eliminates mitochondria-dependent cells; whether HBV rewires this vulnerability remains unknown. Here we unveil a novel HBV X protein (HBx)-driven mechanism of cuproptosis evasion. Integrative analysis of clinical specimens, HBx-transgenic (HBx-Tg) mice, and multi-omics datasets revealed marked downregulation of STEAP4 (six-transmembrane epithelial antigen of prostate 4), a metalloreductase essential for cuproptosis sensitivity, in HBV-positive HCC. Mechanistically, HBx attenuates sirtuin 3 (SIRT3), impairing deacetylation of STEAP4 at lysine 404 and abolishing its mitochondrial targeting. Consequently, cells switch from the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle respiration to glycolysis, reducing sensitivity to the copper ionophore elesclomol (ES). Restoring STEAP4 expression or pharmacological activation of SIRT3 with honokiol (HKL) re-instated mitochondrial STEAP4 localization and re-sensitized HBV-related HCC cells to cuproptosis; combination with ES produced synergistic tumor suppression in vitro and in orthotopic models. Collectively, our findings establish the SIRT3-STEAP4 axis as a novel regulator of cuproptosis resistance in HBV-related HCC. HBx-mediated repression of SIRT3 disrupts STEAP4 deacetylation and mitochondrial targeting, fostering metabolic reprogramming and evasion of copper-induced cell death. The results provide a pre-clinical rationale for copper-directed combination strategies in HBV-associated HCC.
PMID:41840161 | DOI:10.1038/s41418-026-01713-w