Cell cycle control by maspin associated with gastric cancer

Abstract

Gastric cancer (GC) is the second cause of cancer death and almost a million people suffer from it every year in worldwide. Given that GC high-risk people can be prevented from GC development through controlling the environmental factors, it is undoubtedly im-portant to find out the genetic factors for discrimination of GC high-risk people. However, the number of already known genetic factors is still fewer in GC than in other main cancers. Maspin, also called as SERPINB5 (SERine Proteinase INhibitor B family), was firstly known as a tumor suppressor in breast cancer. Its biological functions discovered so far in-clude the inhibition of metastasis and angiogenesis, and the promotion of cell adhesion and apoptosis. According to prior studies maspin has different roles in different types of tissues and even shows no function or expression in a few other cancers. Thus, it is interesting to study the function of maspin in an organ-specific manner. Previous researches for cancer-related genetic factors mostly provided us information about gene names or risky loci but it is not sufficient to acquire real targets for treating GC patients. Here, we investigated the clinical relevance and the role of maspin in GC. It will give proper genetic markers and treatment planning for GC. To estimate the genetic association of maspin with GC in Korea, we collected a total of 865 unrelated Korean participants including 255 diffuse type gastric cancer (DGC) cases, 179 intestinal type gastric cancer (IGC) cases and 431 unaffected controls with their written informed consent at Seoul National University Hospital, Hanyang University Guri Hospital, Chungnam National University Hospital, and Eulji University Hospital in Korea. 15 tagging SNPs (tSNP) were selected to cover from promoter to 3’ UTR of maspin (from 8000 bp upstream region to 3000 bp downstream region of maspin, tSNP r2 cut off P value=0.7). Among them, 1 tSNP was excluded at primer design step and genotyping result of 2 ...