Abstract
Prostate cancer has become epidemic, and environmental factors such as cadmium may be partly responsible. This study reports malignant transformation of the nontumorigenic human prostatic epithelial cell line RWPE-1 by in vitro cadmium exposure. The cadmium-transformed cells exhibited a loss of contact inhibition in vitro and rapidly formed highly invasive and occasionally metastatic adenocarcinomas upon inoculation into mice. The transformed cells also showed increased secretion of MMP-2 and MMP-9, a phenomenon observed in human prostate tumors and linked to aggressive behavior. Cadmium-induced malignant transformation of human prostate epithelial cells strongly fortifies the evidence for a potential role of cadmium in prostate cancer.
Footnotes
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The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
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↵1 Supported in part by the National Cancer Institute, NIH, under Contract N01-C0-56000
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↵2 To whom requests for reprints should be addressed, at National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, MD F0-09, 111 Alexander Drive, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. E-mail: waalkes{at}niehs.ni
- Received March 31, 2000.
- Accepted November 29, 2000.
- ©2001 American Association for Cancer Research.
Volume 61, Issue 2
