PURPOSE In an effort to additionally determine the global patterns of CpG island hypermethylation in sporadic breast cancer, we searched for aberrant promoter methylation at 10 gene loci in 54 primary breast cancer and 10 breast benign lesions. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Genomic DNA sodium bisulfate converted from benign and malignant tissues was used as template in methyl-specific PCR for BRCA1, p1...

The wild-type p53 gene has been widely implicated in the regulation of hypermethylated in cancer-1 (HIC-1) transcription, a master growth regulatory gene with multiple promoters and, consequently, multiple alternatively spliced transcripts. We investigated the role of p53 (wild type and mutant, both endogenous and exogenous) in modulating the various HIC-1 transcripts. We discovered a novel uns...

PURPOSE To determine the role of methylation of HIC1, a candidate tumor suppressor gene on 17p13.3, in various types of pediatric tumors. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN We examined the methylation status of the HIC1 promoter by methylation specific PCR in 157 pediatric tumors and 27 nonmalignant tissues. We correlated methylation with mRNA expression by reverse transcription-PCR in eight tumor-derived c...

We have determined the methylation frequencies of 24 CpG islands of genes associated with DNA damage responses or with ovarian cancer in 106 stage III/IV epithelial ovarian tumors. We have analyzed this data for whether there is evidence of a CpG island methylator phenotype or associations of CpG island methylation with response to chemotherapy in advanced ovarian cancer. Frequent methylation w...

BACKGROUND Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common cancers in the western world. Screening is an efficient method of reducing cancer-related mortality. Molecular biomarkers for cancer in general and CRC in particular have been proposed, and hypermethylated DNA from stool or blood samples are already implemented as biomarkers for CRC screening. We aimed to evaluate the performance of p...

Transcriptional silencing associated with aberrant promoter hypermethylation is a common mechanism of inactivation of tumor suppressor genes in cancer cells. To globally profile the genes silenced by hypermethylation in prostate cancer, we screened a whole genome expression microarray for genes reactivated in the LNCaP, DU-145, PC-3, and MDA2b prostate tumor cell lines after treatment with the ...

C13ORF18 is frequently hypermethylated in cervical cancer but not in normal cervix and might serve as a biomarker for the early detection of cervical cancer in scrapings. As hypermethylation is often observed for silenced tumor suppressor genes (TSGs), hypermethylated biomarker genes might exhibit tumor suppressive activities upon re-expression. Epigenetic drugs are successfully exploited to re...