Gastric Cancer: Antitumor Activity of RUNX3

Although the incidence of gastric cancer declined in the West from the 1940s to the 1980s, it remains a major public health problem throughout the world (Parkin et al., 2005). In Asia and parts of South America in particular, gastric cancer is the most common epithelial malignancy and leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Moreover, gastric cancer remains the second most frequently diagnosed malignancy worldwide and the cause of 12% of all cancer-related deaths each year (Parkin et al., 2005; Zheng et al., 2004). Advances in the treatment of this disease are likely to come from a fuller understanding of its biology and behavior. The aggressive nature of human metastatic gastric carcinoma is related to mutations of various oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes and abnormalities of several growth factors and their receptors (Ushijima and Sasako, 2004). These mutations and abnormalities affect the downstream signal transduction pathways involved in the control of cell growth and differentiation. Specifically, they confer a tremendous survival and growth advantage to gastric cancer cells. Studies have indicated the role of several tumor suppressor genes in gastric cancer development and progression, including the E-cadherin/CDH1 gene, TP53, p16 (Ushijima and Sasako, 2004), and, recently, runt-related (RUNX) genes (Li et al., 2002).