biomolecules Article Differential Expression of ADP/ATP Carriers as a Biomarker of Metabolic Remodeling and Survival in Kidney Cancers Lucia Trisolini 1,†, Luna Laera 1,† , Maria Favia 1,† , Antonella Muscella 2 , Alessandra Castegna 1, Vito Pesce 1 , Lorenzo Guerra 1, Anna De Grassi 1,3,* , Mariateresa Volpicella 1,* and Ciro Leonardo Pierri 1,3,* 1 Department of Biosciences, Biotechnologies, Biopharmaceutics, University “Aldo Moro” of Bari, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy;
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[email protected] (L.G.) 2 Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Biologiche e Ambientali (Di.S.Te.B.A.), Università del Salento, 73100 Lecce, Italy;
[email protected] 3 BROWSer S.r.l. c/o, Department of Biosciences, Biotechnologies, Biopharmaceutics, University “Aldo Moro” of Bari, Via E. Orabona, 4, 70126 Bari, Italy * Correspondence:
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[email protected] (C.L.P.); Tel.: +39-080-5443614 (A.D.G. & C.L.P.); +39-080-5443311 (M.V.) † These authors equally contributed. Abstract: ADP/ATP carriers (AACs) are mitochondrial transport proteins playing a strategic role in maintaining the respiratory chain activity, fueling the cell with ATP, and also regulating mitochon- drial apoptosis. To understand if AACs might represent a new molecular target for cancer treatment, we evaluated AAC expression levels in cancer/normal tissue pairs available on the Tissue Cancer Genome Atlas database (TCGA), observing that AACs are dysregulated in most of the available samples.