Real-imaging cDNA-AFLP transcript profiling of pancreatic cancer patients: Egr-1 as a potential key regulator of muscle cachexia

doi:10.1186/1471-2407-12-265

BMC Cancer. 2012; 12: 265.

Published online 2012 June 21. doi: 10.1186/1471-2407-12-265

PMCID: PMC3465185

Real-imaging cDNA-AFLP transcript profiling of pancreatic cancer patients: Egr-1 as a potential key regulator of muscle cachexia

Alexander Skorokhod,^#^1,⁴ Jeannine Bachmann,^#² Nathalia A Giese,³ Marc E Martignoni,² and Holger Krakowski-Roosen¹

¹Division of Preventive Oncology (G110), National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Im Neuenheimer Feld 581, 69120, Heidelberg, Germany

²Department of Surgery, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technische Universität München, Ismaninger Str. 22, 81675, Munich, Germany

³Department of General Surgery, University of Heidelberg, ImNeuenheimer Feld, 110 69120, Heidelberg, Germany

⁴Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Zabolotnogo str. 150, 03143, Kiev, Ukraine

Corresponding author.

^#Contributed equally.

Alexander Skorokhod: Alexander.Skorokhod/at/med.uni-heidelberg.de; Jeannine Bachmann: Jeannine.Bachmann/at/tum.de; Nathalia A Giese: Nathalia.Giese/at/med.uni-heidelberg.de; Marc E Martignoni: Martignoni/at/tum.de; Holger Krakowski-Roosen: h.krakowsi-roosen/at/dkfz.de

Received December 19, 2011; Accepted May 24, 2012.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Abstract

Background

Cancer cachexia is a progressive wasting syndrome and the most prevalent characteristic of cancer in patients with advanced pancreatic adenocarcinoma. We hypothesize that genes expressed in wasted skeletal muscle of pancreatic cancer patients may determine the initiation and severity of cachexia syndrome.

Experimental design

We studied gene expression in skeletal muscle biopsies from pancreatic cancer patients with and without cachexia utilizing Real-Imaging cDNA-AFLP-based transcript profiling for genome-wide expression analysis.

Results

Our approach yielded 183 cachexia-associated genes. Ontology analysis revealed characteristic changes for a number of genes involved in muscle contraction, actin cytoskeleton rearrangement, protein degradation, tissue hypoxia, immediate early response and acute-phase response.

Conclusions

We demonstrate that Real-Imaging cDNA-AFLP analysis is a robust method for high-throughput gene expression studies of cancer cachexia syndrome in patients with pancreatic cancer. According to quantitative RT-PCR validation, the expression levels of genes encoding the acute-phase proteins α-antitrypsin and fibrinogen α and the immediate early response genes Egr-1 and IER-5 were significantly elevated in the skeletal muscle of wasted patients. By immunohistochemical and Western immunoblotting analysis it was shown, that Egr-1 expression is significantly increased in patients with cachexia and cancer. This provides new evidence that chronic activation of systemic inflammatory response might be a common and unifying factor of muscle cachexia.

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