J Pharmacol Exp Ther 2004, 311: 1062–1070.CrossRefPubMed Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing

interests. Authors’ contributions DS carried out the molecular genetic studies, participated in the cell culture and drafted the manuscript. GS carried out the drug sensitive analysis. GH participated learn more in the tests of internal irradiation with32P. JZ participated in the design of the study and performed the statistical analysis. EL conceived of the study, and participated in its design and coordination. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Introduction Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a frequent and lethal malignancy with high rate of metastasis, especially in some regions of Africa and Asia [1]. It ranks the sixth most common cancer of men and 11th one of women worldwide. There were more than half a million deaths per year. The number of new HCC cases occurring each year is almost equivalent

to the number of deaths [2, 3]. Since HCC is clinically silent at early stage, most HCC patients (> 80%) are presented with advanced Akt inhibitor or unresectable disease. Without treatment, the 5-year survival rate of HCC is less than 5%. To those with resected disease, the recurrence rate can be as high as 50% at 2 years and the 5 year survival rate is only 25–39%. Despite of the advances in treatment, the prognosis of HCC remains very poor due to the frequent presence of recurrence and the high rate of metastasis [3–5]. The programmed cell

death 4 (PDCD4) was found to be an inhibitor of neoplastic transformation. It was first found to be highly expressed during apoptosis, but the role of PDCD4 in programmed cell death was not clear. A comparative study on cells with different transformation response to tumor promoters revealed that PDCD4 was expressed more than ten folds higher in promotion-sensitive cells than in promotion-resistant cells. In less progressed mouse keratinocytes, see more higher level of PDCD4 was expressed [6]. Later investigations demonstrated that loss of PDCD4 expression was associated with tumor progression in carcinomas of the lung, colon, prostate, and breast [7]. The inhibition of PDCD4 on transformation is achieved through down-regulation of the JNK signal transduction pathway which is essential for cell migration. Decrease of JNK activity then leads to inhibition of cell migration [8, 9]. The metastasis tumor antigen 1 (MTA1) was originally identified by differential expression in rat mammary adenocarcinoma metastatic cells [10]. The expression of the MTA1 gene was found to be positively correlated with metastatic potential of some human cell lines and tissues, such as the breast, prostate, colon and pancreas [11–13].