ERK Pathway Regulates EZH2 Overexpression in Association with Aggressive Breast Cancer Subtypes
Oncogene (2011) 30, 4118–4128 & 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserved 0950-9232/11 www.nature.com/onc ORIGINAL ARTICLE MEK–ERK pathway regulates EZH2 overexpression in association with aggressive breast cancer subtypes S Fujii1, K Tokita1, N Wada2, K Ito3, C Yamauchi1, Y Ito4 and A Ochiai1 1Pathology Division, Research Center for Innovative Oncology, National Cancer Center at Kashiwa, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan; 2Breast Surgery Division, National Cancer Center Hospital East, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan; 3Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan and 4Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, Proteos, Singapore EZH2 overexpression occurs in various malignancies and some inactivation (Plath et al., 2003). On the other is associated with a poor outcome. We have so far hand, there have been several reports that overexpres- demonstrated that EZH2 downregulates the important sion of EZH2 occurs in various malignancies and that it genes such as E-cadherin and RUNX3 by increasing is associated with a poor outcome in prostate cancer and histone H3K27 trimethylation. However, the mechanism breast cancer (Varambally et al., 2002; Kleer et al., of EZH2 overexpression in various cancer cells remains 2003). In an attempt to determine the functional role of unclear. In this study we carried out a promoter analysis EZH2 overexpression in cancer tissue, we have already of the EZH2 gene and investigated whether a survival demonstrated that EZH2 downregulates important signal that is upregulated in cancer cells is related to genes, such as E-cadherin and RUNX3, by increasing overexpression at the transcription level. We also explored histone H3K27 trimethylation, which suggests that it the clinical relevance of the signaling pathway that leads may be an oncogene (Fujii et al., 2008; Fujii and Ochiai, to EZH2 overexpression in breast cancer and demon- 2008).
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