Cell NCI-H460 Research Articles

Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor: Acting as an Autocrine Growth Factor for Human Gastric Adenocarcinoma Cell MGC803

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is known to be a highly specific mitogen for endothelial cells through two high-affinity tyrosine kinase receptors, VEGFR-1 and VEGFR-2, which are almost specifically expressed in endothelial cells. However, recent findings showed that VEGF receptors may also expressed by nonendothelial cells, especially by tumor cells. To further understand the functional expression of VEGF receptors by nonendothelial cells, our preliminary screening detected the expression of VEGFR-2 in 115 different paraffin-embedded cancer specimens including 35 cases of bladder tumor, 30 cases of breast cancer, 25 cases of intestinal cancer, and 25 cases of lung cancer with immunohistochemistry. The results showed that VEGFR-2 was widely expressed in different tumor tissues. By reverse transcription PCR, NCI-H23, NCI-H460, MGC803, MDA-MB-231, 293, and MCF7 cells were evaluated for the mRNA expression of both VEGF and VEGFR-2. The data indicated that all these tumor cell lines expressed detectable amounts of VEGF mRNA, but only 293, MCF7, and MGC803 cells coexpressed VEGFR-2. Immunoblot analysis also demonstrated the expression of VEGFR-2 at protein level. We further demonstrate that exogenous rhVEGF165 could stimulate cell growth in MGC803, a tumor cell line derived from gastric adenocarcinoma, in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Furthermore, the antibodies against rhVEGF165 and VEGFR-2 could block rhVEGF165-mediated proliferation of MGC803 cells. These unexpected results provided direct evidence that VEGF may act as an autocrine growth factor to induce the proliferation of gastric adenocarcinoma cells as well as tumor angiogenic cells, thus suggesting a promising tumor therapeutic application based upon the VEGF system.

Binary Formal Inference-Based Recursive Modeling Using Multiple Atom and Physicochemical Property Class Pair and Torsion Descriptors as Decision Criteria

Analysis of a large amount of information, typically generated by high-throughput screening, is a very difficult task. To address this problem, we have developed binary formal inference-based recursive modeling using atom and physicochemical property class pair and torsion descriptors. Recursive partitioning is an exploratory technique for identifying structure in data. The implemented algorithm utilizes a statistical hypothesis testing, similar to Hawkins' formal inference-based recursive modeling program, to separate a data set into two homogeneous subsets at each splitting node. This process is repeated recursively until no further separation can occur. Our implementation of recursive partitioning differs from previously reported approaches by employing a method to extract multiple features at each splitting node. The method was examined for its ability to distinguish random and real data sets. The effect of including a single descriptor and multiple descriptors in the splitting descriptor set was also studied. The method was tested using 27 401 National Cancer Institute (NCI) compounds and their pGI50 (-log(GI50)) against the NCI-H23 cell line. The analyses show that partitioning using multiple descriptors is advantageous in analyzing the structure-activity relationship information.

Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor promotes invasion by human lung cancer cell lines in vitro

The effects of exogenous and endogenous granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) on invasion by cancer cells were studied, using lung cancer cell lines that produce G-CSF (NCI-H157) and lines that do not (PC-9 and NCI-H23). The invasive capacity of NCI-H157 cells was 26- to 27-fold higher than that of PC-9 and NCI-H23 cells. The invasiveness of PC-9 cells was stimulated by exogenous G-CSF, while that of NCI-H157 cells was not. Antibodies against G-CSF blocked the stimulation of PC-9 cell invasiveness by exogenous G-CSF. Anti G-CSF antibodies also inhibited invasion by NCI-H157 cells in the absence of exogenous G-CSF. These results suggest that endogenous and exogenous G-CSF both stimulate invasion by lung cancer cells.

ABCC10/MRP7 is associated with vinorelbine resistance in non-small cell lung cancer

The non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells SK-LC6 and NCI-H23 were continuously exposed to vinorelbine (VNB), and the VNB-resistant clones, SK-LC6/VNB and H23/VNB were selected. Since SK-LS6/VNB and H23/VNB cells showed cross-resistance to certain anticancer drugs, such as paclitaxel and docetaxel, we examined the gene expression levels of drug efflux transporters of the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) family. We found that the gene expression of ABCB1/MDR1 and ABCC10/MRP7 in SK-LC6/VNB and H23/VNB cells was increased compared with that in SK-LS6 and NCI-H23 cells, whereas the expression of ABCC1/MRP1, ABCC2/MRP2, ABCC3/MRP3 and ABCG2/BCRP did not change among these cells. Treatment with ABCB1/MDR1 inhibitor verapamil and ABCC10/MRP7 inhibitor sulfin-pyrazone altered the sensitivity of SK-LC6/VNB cells to vinorelbine. To confirm the ABCC10/MRP7 activity, we transfected small interfering RNA against ABCC10/MRP7 to ABCC10/MRP7-expressing RERF-LC-AI cells resulting in the decrease of ABCC10/MRP7 expression concomitant with the alteration of VNB cytotoxicity. Moreover, we detected the expression of ABCC10/MRP7 in 12 of 17 NSCLC cells, whereas ABCB1/MDR1 was detected in only 3 of 17 NSCLC cells. These results indicate that ABCC10/MRP7 may confer VNB resistance in NSCLC.