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Distant metastasis of colorectal cancer (CRC) occurs mainly in the liver and is the major cause of death. This study explored the overexpression of liver metastasis-associated mRNAs in human CRC by using a well-established, weighted enzymatic chip array platform. Analysis of 10 CRC tissue specimens compared with their normal adjacent tissues revealed that ATP2A2, ELAVL4, hTERT, KCTD2, MUC1, OLFM4, S100B, and TM4SF4 genes were upregulated (gene expression ratio of cancer tissue to paired normal tissue was >2) by microarray and bioinformatics analysis. A gene chip including eight candidate genes was constructed to investigate the circulating tumor cells in blood specimens of 103 preoperative CRC patients and further validated by reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction. Liver metastasis was significantly correlated with overexpression of S100B (p=0.001, OR=9.217), TM4SF3 (p=0.011, OR=4.385), and OLFM4 (p=0.015, OR=3.438). These results suggest that S100B, TM4SF3, and OLFM4 overexpression may affect metastatic behavior of tumor cells in Taiwanese CRC patients.
Huang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.