Document Type

Article

Journal Title

British journal of cancer

Publication Date

5-6-2008

Volume

98

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer is a highly lethal malignancy with a dismal 5-year survival of less than 5%. The scarcity of early biomarkers has considerably hindered our ability to launch preventive measures for this malignancy in a timely manner. Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), a 24-kDa glycoprotein, was reported to be upregulated nearly 27-fold in pancreatic cancer cells compared to normal ductal cells in a microarray analysis. Given the need for biomarkers in the early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, we investigated the expression of NGAL in tissues with the objective of examining if NGAL immunostaining could be used to identify foci of pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia, premalignant lesions preceding invasive cancer. To examine a possible correlation between NGAL expression and the degree of differentiation, we also analysed NGAL levels in pancreatic cancer cell lines with varying grades of differentiation. Although NGAL expression was strongly upregulated in pancreatic cancer, and moderately in pancreatitis, only a weak expression could be detected in the healthy pancreas. The average composite score for adenocarcinoma (4.26+/-2.44) was significantly higher than that for the normal pancreas (1.0) or pancreatitis (1.0) (P

MeSH Headings

Acute-Phase Proteins, Adenocarcinoma, Adult, Aged, Blotting, Western, Carcinoma, Pancreatic Ductal, Cell Line, Tumor, Early Diagnosis, Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay, Female, Gene Expression Regulation, Neoplastic, Humans, Immunohistochemistry, Lipocalins, Male, Middle Aged, Pancreatic Neoplasms, Proto-Oncogene Proteins, RNA, Neoplasm, ROC Curve, Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction, Tumor Markers, Biological

ISSN

1532-1827

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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