Prostate cancer is the most diagnosed noncutaneous cancer and ranks as the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in American males. Metastasis is the primary cause of prostate cancer mortality. Survival rate is only 28% for metastatic patients, but is nearly 100% for patients with localized prostate cancers. Molecular mechanisms that underlie this malignancy remain obscure, and this stu...

Isoform specific function of glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK3) in cancer is not well defined. We report that silencing of GSK3α, but not GSK3β expression inhibited proliferation, survival and colony formation by the PC3, DU145 and LNCaP prostate cancer cells, and the growth of PC3 tumor xenografts in athymic nude mice. Silencing of GSK3α, but not GSK3β resulted in reduced proliferation and enha...

Valproic acid (VPA) is a clinically available histone deacetylase inhibitor with promising anticancer attributes. Recent studies have demonstrated the anticancer effects of VPA on prostate cancer cells. However, little is known about the differential effects of VPA between metastatic and non-metastatic prostate cancer cells and the relationship between the expression of metastasis suppressor pr...

Cancer cell invasion is the critical first step of metastasis, yet, little is known about how cancer cells invade and initiate metastasis in a complex extracellular matrix. Using a cell line from bone metastasis of prostate cancer (PC3), we analyzed how prostate cancer cells migrate in a physiologically relevant 3D Matrigel. We found that PC3 cells migrated more efficiently as multi-cellular cl...

We investigated the different gene expression between prostate peripheral zone stromal cells (PZs) and the transitional zone stromal cells (TZs), and found overexpression of LIM domain only 2 (LMO2) gene in PZs. Thus, the biological effects of LMO2 on prostate cell proliferation, migration in the stromal microenvironment were further explored, and the possible molecular mechanisms were explaine...

Biologically active peptide hormones are synthesized from larger precursor proteins by a variety of posttranslational processing reactions. Endoproteolytic cleavage at the Lys74-Lys75 dibasic processing site of progastrin is the major determinant for the relative distribution of gastrin heptadecapeptide and tetratriacontapeptide in tissues. Thus, we explored the ability of two prohormone conver...

The present data showed that 10-methoxy-9-nitrocamptothecin (MONCPT), a family of camptothecin analogues, possessed high antitumor activity in vitro and in vivo. Cytotoxicity assays showed that MONCPT was a potential and highly efficient antitumor compound with IC50 values of 0.1 to 500 nmol/L in nine tumor cell lines. The high cytotoxic potency of MONCPT was paralleled with its ability to incr...

Gonadotropin-releasing hormone-I (GnRH-I) is known to directly regulate prostate cancer cell proliferation. However, the role of GnRH-II in prostate cancer is unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of the GnRH-II antagonist trptorelix-1 (Trp-1) on growth of PC3 prostate cancer cells. Trp-1 induced growth inhibition of PC3 cells in vitro and inhibited growth of PC3 cells xenografted into nude...

The expression of the gene encoding adrenomedullin (AM), a multifunctional peptide hormone, in the prostate is localized to the epithelial cells. Prostate cancer cells are derived from prostatic epithelial cells. To elucidate the potential role of the AM gene in prostate cancer progression, we have stably-transfected the PC3 human prostate cancer cell line with an AM gene expression vector. The...

Aberrant protein glycosylation is known to be associated with the development of cancers. The aberrant glycans are produced by the combined actions of changed glycosylation enzymes, substrates and transporters in glycosylation synthesis pathways in cancer cells. To identify glycosylation enzymes associated with aggressive prostate cancer (PCa), we analyzed the difference in the expression of gl...