Figure 7.

Human metastatic ovarian tumors express high levels of CASZ1. A, B. The effect of CASZ1 knockdown on metastasis in vivo. Briefly, 5 × 10⁵ MCAS cells expressing sh-luc or sh-CASZ1 (2) were intravenously injected into mice, and the mice were euthanized 7 weeks after the injection. A. Upper panel: representative image of lungs derived from the mice injected with MCAS cells expressing sh-luc or sh-CASZ1 (2). Lower panel: histological analysis of a mouse lung using H&E staining. B. Quantification of lung metastatic nodules 7 weeks after the injection. The data are expressed as the mean ± SEM. *P = 0.02 by Student’s t-test. (n = 5 mice per group). C. Two representative paired ovarian primary and metastatic tumors stained with an antibody against CASZ1. Upper right, para-aortic lymph node; lower right, peritoneal metastatic tumor. Scale bar: 100 μm. D. Samples from a total of 20 EOC patients with stage III or IV disease were evaluated. The paired primary and metastatic tumors were stained with an antibody against CASZ1 and scored according to the following scoring system: 0: no expression, 1: 1-25% CASZ1-positive tumor cells; 2: 26-50% CASZ1-positive tumor cells; and 3: 51-100% CASZ1-positive tumor cells. Among the primary tumor samples, 1 was assigned a score of 0, 14 were assigned a score of 1, 4 were assigned a score of 2, and 1 was assigned a score of 3. Among the metastatic tumor samples, 6 were assigned a score of 1, 4 were assigned a score of 2, and 10 were assigned a score of 3. Compared with the paired primary tumors, CASZ1 expression was significantly up-regulated in the metastatic tumors. P = 0.003 by Wilcoxon signed-rank test.