The Role Of Artemin In The Occurrence And Development Of Liver Cancer

Liver cancer is one of the world's top ten cancers and it has a high incidence all over the world specially in China. But there's no efficient treatment for liver cancer up to now. The main reason for this is that it's usually too late to detect and diagnose it.Artemin is one of the GDNF family, which are endogenous nerve growth factors. Research results show that ARTN is related to many cancers including mammary carcinoma and pancreatic cancer. Our research proves that Artemin is expressed in liver cancer lines and forced expression of ARTN results in increased liver cancer cell anchorage-independent growth and colony formation in soft agar. Forced expression of ARTN also promoted the liver cancer cell migration and invasion. Moreover, forced expression of ARTN increased tumour size in xenograft models and formed highly proliferative, poorly differentiated and invasive tumors. The pathological study shows that ARTN is associated to the prognosis of liver cancer. So we advise that ARTN could be used as a target and marker for the diagnosis and treatment of liver cancer.