Role of the Adjacent Stroma Cells in Prostate Cancer Development and Progression: Synergy between TGF-β and IGF Signaling

Figure 1

In a study of diagnosis of prostate cancer using stromal signatures [61], we identified 18 normal subjects and 37 prostate cancer patients in whom the biopsy contained no cancer elements. Microarray analysis was performed on an Affymetrix U133A 2.0 array platform. We extracted the data for TGF-β1, IGF-I, and IGF-II for these 55 cases. The expression intensities were normalized against those for GAPDH. The resulting relative values for each growth factor were plotted on the 𝑦-axis. Results indicated that, in all three growth factors, the values for the normal subjects were relatively low. The values for cancer cases increased and were correlated with Gleason score, suggesting that the expression of these growth factors is associated with cancer progression.