Introduction:
- Epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a crucial process during invasion or metastasis of cancer. The SLUGgene plays an important role in EMT by repressing E-cadherin together with Zinc-finger family, i.e., SNAILand ZEB1/2, and is accelerated in the oxygenic or nutritional deficient environment [1].
- The SLUGgene is reported to be frequently overexpressed in pancreatic cancer (PC) [2,3] which is characterized by hypovascularizationand poor prognosis due to the high frequency of invasion and metastasis even in the early stage; however, its contribution to characteristics or metastatic features in PC remains elusive.