Altered Expressions Of Caveolin-1 And E-cadherin In Gastric Cancer And Determination Of Their Potential Correlation

Objective:Stomach cancer is one of the commonest malignancies in the world and remains an important cause of cancer-associated mortality. It has been well known that the carcinogenesis and development of gastric cancer (GC) exhibit stepwise features that involve multiple genes, multiple factors and undergo multiple stages. During gastric tumorigenesis, activated oncogenes, inactivated tumor suppressor genes and the following changes in biological behaviors are involved, leading to tumor formation. For these reasons, extensive investigations were conducted to find the molecular mechanism(s) of gastric carcinogenesis and to explore the approaches for early diagnosis, treatment and prevention.Signal transduction regulator caveolin-1 is a kind of structure proteins located in caveolae near the cell lipid membrane. Caveolae serves as the integrator of all signal molecules. The carcinogensis and development is concerned with abnormal cell proliferation, differentiation, migration, apoptosis and angiogenesis. Caveolin-1 and caveolae participate in regulation of signal pathways. The expression statuses of cavoelin-1 and caveolae structure are closely related with cell transformation. Caveolin-1 is expressed in almost all of normal cells, while decreased or obviously downregulated in tumor and transforming cells. The induction of caveolin-1 expression can induce tumor cell re-differentiation and inhibit metastasis, so caveolin-1 is regarded as tumor suppressor. However, it was reported in recent years that increased caveolin-1 might also attribute to tumor cell proliferation and lymph node metastasis, which indicates its double actions in regulating tumor biological behaviors.