Role of a Novel Antioncogene that Prevents Metastatic Spread of Disease.

This is the final report for this grant. There were two major papers and several abstracts published from this work. The main goals were to determine the mechanism of action of nm23 and to determine if the expression of this anti-oncogene can predict the metastatic spread of disease. The over-expression of this gene has been reported to prevent tumors from spreading from the primary site to distant sites in a nude mouse model and has been shown to be prognostic indicator for a good prognosis. We wanted to relate its expression in 150 primary breast cancer tumors to other markers that have been shown to be of prognostic use. These markers included protease-related factors, steroid receptors, proliferative activity and ploidy status. Our results indicated that there was no relationship to these markers. We did find that over-expression of nm23 in a breast cancer cell line resulted in a significant decrease in growth-factor- stimulated motility.