Molecular characterization of pancreatic cancers as seen in the SLUG gene revealing cancer progression

Authors:

Natsuko Kawanishi, Yasmine Baca, Joanne Xiu, Hiroyuki Arai, Jingyuan Wang, Francesca Battaglin, Shivani Soni, Wu Zhang, Anthony Shields, Richard Goldberg, Benjamin Weinberg, Emil Lou, Davendra Sohal, Michael Hall, Andreas Seeber, MohDKhushman, Albert Lockhart, John Marshall, W. Michael Korn, and Heinz-Josef Lenz

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.

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