Journal
JOURNAL OF CELL SCIENCE
Volume 122, Issue 16, Pages 2906-2913Publisher
COMPANY BIOLOGISTS LTD
DOI: 10.1242/jcs.050468
Keywords
Metalloprotease; Thrombospondin; Methylation; Degradome
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Funding
- Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion-Spain
- Fundacion Marcelino Botin
- European Union Framework Programme projects
- Obra Social Cajastur, Spain
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Proteases have long been associated with tumor progression, given their ability to degrade extracellular matrix components and facilitate invasion and metastasis. However, recent findings indicate that different proteases can also act as tumor-suppressor enzymes. We have recently reported that lung carcinoma cells expressing the ADAMTS-12 metalloprotease show a remarkable impairment of growth in immunodeficient mice as compared with parental cells. Here, we show that ADAMTS12 promoter is hypermethylated in cancer cell lines and tumor tissues. Interestingly, ADAMTS12 expression in the stromal cells surrounding epithelial malignant cells is higher than in the paired normal tissues. Moreover, the expression of this metalloprotease in colon fibroblasts co-cultured with colon cancer cell lines is higher than in those cultured alone. Furthermore, the expression of ADAMTS-12 by these fibroblasts is linked with an anti-proliferative effect on tumor cells. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that ADAMTS-12 is a novel anti-tumor protease that can reduce the proliferative properties of tumor cells. This function is lost by epigenetic silencing in tumor cells, but concurrently induced in stromal cells, probably as part of a response of the normal tissue aimed at controlling the progression of cancer.
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