Overexpresssion of Tyrosine Kinase Discoidin domain receptor I (DDR1 ) in Transitional cell Carcinoma Szu-Ting Chen,* and Shie-Liang Hsieh* Institute and Department of Microbiology and Immunology, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan; To whom proofs are to be sent: Shie-Liang Hsieh, Department and Institute of Microbiology and Immunology, National Yang-Ming University, Shih-Pai, Taipei 112, Taiwan. E-mail address:
[email protected] Telephone number: 886-2-28267161 Fax number: 886-2-28277933 INTRODUCTION DDR1, discoidin domain receptor 1, belongs to the novel subfamily of tyrosine kinase receptor, which forms homodimer upon ligand engagement. DDR1 is distinguished from other receptor tyrosine kinase by the discoidin domain in their extracellular domain, which is a homology region originally identified in Dictyostelium discoideum (slime mold) protein, discoidin I, and involves in cells aggregation. Discoidin-1 has binding specificity toward galactose and N-acetyl galactosamine and is essential for slime mold cells adhesion, migration and aggregation during its development, suggesting that DDR1 shared similar biologically function in mammalian [1-3]. DDR1 has been found mainly distributed and in human tissue epithelia, such as kidney, breast, lung [3], bronchial [4] and keratinocytes [5]. Furthermore, DDR1 has been also reported its expression in immune system like the monocyte-derived dendritic cells, annotated as CD167 [6] and macrophage[7]. However, recently, the overexpression of DDR1 has been detected in several human cancers, such as primary breast cancer [1, 8, 9] ovarian[10, 11], brain[12], esophageal cancer [13], and TCC (our data unpublished) in which raising the possibility that DDR1 may play a important role in tumorigenesis [14].