Background: Elongation factor 1 gamma (EF1 gamma) has been isolated from a pancreatic cancer cell line, while the overexpression of EF1 gamma has also been observed in colorectal carcinomas and adenomas. There is, however, still little information on the expression of EF1 gamma in gastric carcinoma.
Methods: The authors examined the expression of EF1 gamma mRNA in 30 gastric carcinomas and their corresponding paired adjacent normal mucosae obtained during surgery while also examining 10 human digestive tract carcinoma cell lines using Northern blot hybridization.
Results: An overexpression was observed in 22 (73%) of 30 gastric carcinomas, relative to the corresponding normal tissue. In a clinicopathologic study, no relationship was observed between the overexpression of EF1 gamma mRNA and the histologic grading or depth of tumor invasion. However, 15 (68%) of 22 overexpressed cases were positive for vascular permeation, whereas only 1 of 8 nonoverexpressed cases was positive for vascular permeation, and the difference was significant (P < 0.05). Nine (90%) of 10 with more than a 10-fold overexpression relative to the corresponding normal tissue showed severe vascular permeation in the histologic specimens. Conversely, the expression of EF1 gamma was observed not only in the pancreatic and gastric carcinoma cell lines, but also in the hepatic, ileocecal, duodenal, and colon carcinoma cell lines.
Conclusions: The overexpression of EF1 gamma mRNA was observed in both the gastric carcinoma tissue and in all the other cell lines examined. This probable correlation with vascular permeation in gastric carcinoma is thus considered to provide another piece of useful pathologic information.