Investigating the Role of the GAEC1 Oncogene in Human Cancers

Abstract

Cancer is now the most common cause of death in Australia, with an estimated 110,000 new cases in the country in 2009 and 42,000 deaths. Current Australian data indicates that 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women can expect to be diagnosed with cancer in the first 85 years of their life. Cancer is a disease where abnormal cells grow rapidly and spread throughout the body in an uncontrolled manner. Cancer occurs due to several damaging events that can occur in an individual cell or from a combination of many processes. DNA damage is a common feature to all cancers, though not all DNA damage will result in cancer. It has been proved that research on molecular pathways of cancers directly contributes in advanced care for cancer patients by more accurately refining prognosis and selecting the most appropriate adjuvant therapy for these patients. Gene amplified in esophageal cancer 1 (GAEC1) is a novel gene located at 7q22.1 identified using comparative DNA fingerprinting with inter-simple sequence repeat-polymerase chain reaction (ISSR-PCR). GAEC1 protein, based on its cDNA sequence showed no homology to any known protein. Preliminary work on GAEC1 suggested that it has tumorigenic potential and over expression of GAEC1 is a critical step for tumour transformation. GAEC1 was found to be expressed in several normal tissues, including oesophagus, small intestine, colon and non-gastrointestinal sites, such as lung, thymus and prostate. However, because the initial work on this gene was undertaken in oesophageal cancer, there is currently a lack of information of the molecular roles of this novel gene in other cancers.