Novel clinical role of angiopoietin-1 in malignant pleural mesothelioma
Tabata C, Hirayama N, Tabata R, Yasumitsu A, Yamada S, Murakami A, Iida S, Tamura K, Fukuoka K, Kuribayashi K, Terada T, Nakano T.
Dept of Internal Medicine, Hyogo College of Medicine; and These two authors contributed equally to this study.
Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is an aggressive malignant tumour associated with asbestos exposure with limited response to conventional therapy, so diagnosing MPM early is very important. We have previously reported that angiopoietin (Ang)-1 was correlated with bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis. Here, we investigated the association of Ang-1 with the development of MPM which originate from mesenchymal cells similar to lung fibroblasts, and demonstrated that Ang-1 stimulated the cell growth and migration of MPM cells in in vitro studies. We also demonstrated that patients with MPM had significantly higher serum levels of Ang-1 in comparison to a population who had been exposed to asbestos but had not developed MPM. The patients with advanced stage MPM showed higher levels of Ang-1 than the early stage MPM patients and the Kaplan-Meier method revealed a significant correlation between serum Ang-1 levels and survival. We propose the possibility that Ang-1 plays an important role in MPM tumour growth and our data suggest that the serum concentration of Ang-1 could be useful as prognostic factor.
PMID: 20185425 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
*** POSTED MARCH 3, 2010 ***