MAGE-1 (melanoma antigen 1) is an ideal candidate for cancer vaccines because it belongs to a family of genes that are expressed in a number of human tumors of various histological types but not in normal adult tissues except for the testis, and because both humoral and cell-mediated immune responses against MAGE-1 antigen were detected in tumor patients.
We describe here a novel sensitive multimarker nested reverse transcription (RT)-PCR capable of detecting the individual expression of human MAGE-A genes MAGE-1, -2, -3/6, -4, and -12 by rare, disseminated tumor cells in bone marrow and blood of patients with many different types of cancer.
In conclusions, MAGE 1-6 assay can detect any cancer cells that express at least one of eight MAGE subtype genes, and this method may be very useful for the diagnosis of MAGE-expressing cancers.
A two-marker RT-PCR assay with a liver-specific AFP marker and a cancer specific MAGE-1 marker may be a promising tool for detecting blood disseminated HCC cells with a better sensitivity and specificity than a single marker RT-PCR.
Most of the assayed gene regions displayed hypermethylation in cancer vs. adjacent tissue but the TFF1 and MAGEA1 regions were significantly hypomethylated (p ≤0.001).
Inhibitory effects of MAGEA1 on cell proliferation and migration were observed using both gain-of- (MAGEA1 overexpression) and loss-of- (siRNA interference) function approaches in breast (MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231) and ovarian (SKOV3 and SKOV3ip) cancer cell lines.