Original article: general thoracicExpression of human telomerase subunit genes in primary lung cancer and its clinical significance
Section snippets
Patients
A total of 92 tumor specimens from patients with primary lung cancer who underwent pulmonary resection at the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Aichi Cancer Center Hospital from November 1990 to September 1998 were examined. All tissue samples were frozen in liquid nitrogen as soon as possible following surgical removal and stored at −70°C until use. The patients were 66 men and 26 women ranging in age from 41 to 80 years old (median 63). The lesions were 55 adenocarcinomas, 27 squamous cell
Relationship between detection of telomerase activity and expression of hTERT, hTEP1, or hTERC
Results for telomerase activity and expression of hTERC, TEP1, and hTERT in 15 specimens from which both RNA and protein extracts from paired non-neoplastic and tumor tissues were available are summarized in Figure 1. Telomerase activity was detected in 80% (12 of 15) of tumor tissues, whereas a significantly smaller number of non-neoplatstic lung tissues (27% [4 of 15]) had telomerase activity (p = 0.0046, Fisher’s exact test). A much clearer difference was observed for hTERT expression,
Comment
Previous reports suggested that hTERT is a key component of telomerase whose expression is strictly associated with telomerase activity in various systems 9, 10, 12. Expression of hTERT has been observed at high levels in telomerase-positive cancer cell lines but not in non-neoplastic tissues, whereas neither TEP1 nor hTERC expression correlates with telomerase activity 9, 10, 12. However, in recent studies of surgical specimens, although expression of hTERT demonstrated the closest association
Acknowledgements
We thank Mitsuko Suzuki for secretarial assistance. This work was supported in part by the Aichi Cancer Research Foundation, the Charitable Trust Soyu Medical Foundation, the Bristol-Meyers Squibb Biomedical Research Grant Program, a Grant-in-Aid (09671403) from the Ministry of Education Science and Culture of Japan, and the Mitsui Life Social Welfare Foundation.
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2007, European Journal of CancerCitation Excerpt :The RNA component of human telomerase (h-TERC) provides the template for telomere repeat synthesis. Our data confirm that hTERC expression is present in the majority of tumour lung tissues; however, the telomerase activity correlated only with hTERT but not with hTERC, which is in agreement with previous studies.27–29 This indicates that hTERT is the principal regulator of telomerase activity in lung cancer.