Overexpression of FOXA1 inhibits cell proliferation and EMT of human gastric cancer AGS cells

The lack of effective medical treatment for advanced stages of gastric cancer mainly contributes to the high mortality rate. The association of forkhead box protein A1 (FOXA1) with tumor progression has been reported in different human cancers. However, the function of FOXA1 in gastric cancer is largely unknown. In the present study, FOXA1 protein showed a significant reduction in gastric cancer samples comparing with matched control samples. In addition, the higher expression of FOXA1 in transcription level was observed in gastric cancer cell lines as compared with that in normal gastric cell line, while the contrary result was observed in protein level. Then we studied the effects of FOXA1 on gastric cancer cells in vitro and in vivo based on FOXA1-overexpression AGS cells. We found that up-regulation of FOXA1 was notably inhibited the cell proliferation and tumor formation, and induced cell apoptosis. Moreover, overexpression of FOXA1 was able to increase the E-cadherin protein level and decreased the Vimentin protein level, which implicates that FOXA1 probably plays as an inhibitor of epithelial mesenchymal transition. In conclusion, these data suggests that FOXA1 may function as a novel anti-oncogene in gastric cancer cells.