Egidio
Iorio1, Marina Bagnoli2, Alessandro Ricci1,
Maria Elena Pisanu1, Kristine Glunde3, Giancarlo
Castellano2, Elisa Venturini4, Zaver M Bhujwalla3,
Delia Mezzanzanica2, Silvana Canevari2, Franca Podo1
1Istituto Superiore di Sanit, Roma,
Italy; 2Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milano,
Italy; 3Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore,
MD, United States; 4Cogentech-Consortium for Genomic Technologies,
Milano, Italy
Altered
phosphatidylcholine (PC) metabolism in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) can
provide choline-based imaging approaches as powerful tools to improve
diagnosis and identify new therapeutic targets. Measurements are reported on protein
expression and enzyme activation of choline kinase (ChoK) and
PC-specific phospholipase C (PC-plc) in EOC
cell lines compared with non
tumoral counterparts. The role of Chok
and PC-plc in the intracellular accumulation of PCho in EOC cells was
investigated by RNA silencing and pharmacological inhibition respectively.
Analyses are also reported on ChoK mRNA expression and on ChoK and PC-plc
protein expression in a set of surgical specimens from EOC patients.