Galectins as New Prognostic Markers and Potential Therapeutic Targets for Advanced Prostate Cancers

Table 1

Summary of reported galectin functions in prostate cancers.

Galectin	Tumor cell growth/survival/apoptosis		Metastasis		Immune response
	In vitro	In vivo	In vitro	In vivo	In vitro	In vivo
Gal-1	Promotes apoptosis in LNCaP [21]; O-glycosylation protects PCa cell from Gal-1-induced apoptosis [22]; Promotes tubulogenesis [23]	Gal-1 principal inducer of neovascularization [23]	Promotes cell adhesion to ECM, EC [24, 25]; Osteoblasts proliferation and differentiation, effects inhibited by IGF [26]	?	Invasion of T cell in matrigel assays and adhesion of T cell to Gal-1-expressing EC [27]	?
Gal-3	Promotes apoptosis or survival depending of cell subcellular localization or cell type [28–30]; Drug resistance [31, 32]	Gal-3 as inducer of angiogenesis [33]	Interaction with blood vessel allowing metastasis process such as arrest in certain organs [34, 35]; PCa cell with preferential binding to HBME through collagen XXIII and Gal-3 could explain bone metastasis [36, 37]	Anti-Gal-3 Abs or MCP inhibits spontaneous metastasis in Copenhagen rat-injected Dunning rat PCa cells [38], influences bone metastasis as indirect inhibition of Gal-3, and inhibits skeleton metastasis after Luc-PC-3 intracardiac injection [39]; Using Gal-3 inhibitors inhibits tumor growth or lung metastasis [33, 40, 41]	?	?
Gal-8	Exclusive expression at the neoplasic stage in prostate tissue (PCTA-1); links to integrin to inhibit cell adhesion [42]	?	Links to integrin to inhibit cell adhesion and promote metastasis and cell spreading. In contrary, in soluble form Gal-8 promotes cell-adhesion to ECM [43]	?	?	?
Gal-4	Gal-4 as inducer of tubulogenesis [33]	?	?	?	?	?
Gal-9	Gal-9 as inducer of tubulogenesis [33]	?	?	?	?	?
Gal-12	?	?	?	?	?	?
Others Gals	?	?	?	?	?	?