Relation ship between EGF receptor status and the prognosis of ovarian cancer patients

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Autocrine mechanisms by transforming growth factors (TGF), insulin like growth factor are reported to be expressed in many kinds of cancers and cancer cell-lines. We studied the expression of epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor in 35 cases of ovarian cancers and 20 of them expressed EGF receptor and found the biological significance of TGFalpha/EGFR autocrine growth mechanism in primary o, vSSL, ria c cer cells and in an ovarian cancer cell-line, in vitro and in vivo. We-examined the expression of the growth factor and its receptor by Northern blot analysis, immunocytochemistry, binding studies. We also observed-that this autocrine mechanism was more commonly expressed in serous cystadenocarcinomas than in mucinous cancers. It is known that serous type ovarian cancers are more aggressive in their progression than mucinous cystadenocarcinomas. We might propose a possibility that the aggressive growth of serous cystadenocarinomas are, at least in part, due to TGFA/EGF autocrine growth mechanism, and that there might be a possibility of treatments by blocking the autocrine mechanism.