Accumulating evidences have indicated that epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which was originally found in embryogenesis, contributes to tumor invasion, metastatic dissemination and acquisition of therapeutic

resistance [3]. During the process of EMT, epithelial cells change from their epithelial characteristics including cell-cell click here adhesion, apical-basal polarity and lack of motility to mesenchymal features, such as invasiveness, motility and high resistance to cell death [3]. Besides, a series of molecular events occur including down-regulation of epithelial markers such as E-cadherin and up-regulation of mesenchymal markers such as N-cadherin and vimentin [4]. Transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β) is a ubiquitously PF-6463922 in vitro multifunctional cytokine which controls lots of biological events such as development, differentiation and survival of essentially all cell types and tissues [5]. Recently, increasing attention has been paid to its role in the regulation of tumor development and progression. TGF-β is known to play a dual role in tumorigenesis. TGF-β exerts antiproliferative effects in an early phase of tumorigenesis while contributes to tumor progression with aberrations in TGF-β signaling system in later

stages of tumorigenesis [5]. TGF-β overexpression has been found in most pancreatic cancer and clinicopathological analysis showed that TGF-β expression was significantly correlated with lymph node

metastasis and the depth of invasion [5]. TGF-β and its downstream signaling molecules have been shown to play a critical role in EMT of pancreatic cancer [6–9]. However, selleck products the mechanism by which TGF-β induces EMT has not been clear yet. Response gene to complement (RGC)-32 was first cloned by Badea et al. in 1998 and was selleckchem comprehensively expressed in many kinds of tissues such as placenta, kidney, pancreas, liver, heart, brain, etc. [10, 11]. It has been reported that RGC-32 plays an important role in cell proliferation and differentiation [11, 12]. However, the role of RGC-32 in cancer remains controversial. RGC-32 expression has been found to be up-regulated in tumors such as colon, breast and prostate cancer but down-regulated in advanced stages of primary astrocytomas [13, 14]. Similarly, studies on RGC-32 mRNA expression in various metastatic cancers have also yielded different results [15, 16].These studies suggested that RGC-32 plays a complex role in cancer and the effect of RGC-32 may vary among cancers of different organs or tissues. Until now, to our knowledge, no reports have described the role of RGC-32 in pancreatic cancer. In the present study, we found for the first time that the expression of RGC-32 was up-regulated in pancreatic cancer and was correlated with lymph node metastasis and TNM staging.