Survivin and Related Proteins in Canine Mammary Tumors

Abstract

Survivin is reexpressed in most human breast cancers, where its expression has been associated with tumor aggressiveness, poor prognosis, and poor response to therapy. Survivin expression was evaluated in 41 malignant canine mammary tumors (CMTs) by immunohistochemistry, in relation to histological grade and stage, and correlated with that of some related molecules (b-catenin, caspase 3, heat shock proteins) to understand their possible role in canine mammary tumorigenesis. An increase in nuclear survivin expression, compared with healthy mammary glands, was observed in CMTs, where nuclear immunolabeling was related to the presence of necrosis. No statistically significant relation was found between the expression of the investigated molecules and the histological grade or stage. The present study may suggest an important involvement of survivin in CMT tumorigenesis. Its overexpression in most of the cases evaluated might suggest that targeting survivin in CMTs may be a valid anticancer therapy.

MEKK3 and Survivin Expression in Cervical Cancer: Association with Clinicopathological Factors and Prognosis

“…Survivin is encoded on chromosome 17q25 and is a 142-amino acid protein with a unique BIR domain. Survivin expression is low in normal adult tissue, with the exception of the thymus and embryonic organization (Gho et al, 2011), but is strongly expressed in several types of human cancer, including colon carcinoma (Hasan et al, 2014), breast carcinoma (Bongiovanni et al, 2014), and urothelial carcinoma (Chen et al, 2014). In this study, western blotting and real-time PCR analysis of fresh tissue showed significantly increased survivin expression in cancer versus chronic cervicitis, consistent with previous findings.…”

Clinicopathological significance of caspase-3 and Ki-67 expression in canine mammary gland tumours

“…However, in veterinary medicine only few data have been published about the implication of apoptosis in the diagnosis and/or malignancy of canine tumours and, to the best of our knowledge, there is only a single study that used an antibody to the active form of caspase-3 in these tumours (Bongiovanni et al, 2014).…”

“…In the selected areas a total of 1000 tumour cells were counted with the help of a microscopic grid, at high magnification. The results were expressed as a percentage of labelled cells in a total of 1000 tumour cells (Pathmanathan and Balleine, 2013;Bongiovanni et al, 2014).…”

“…Regarding canine mammary gland tumours (CMGT), a few studies have been conducted to investigate the role of apoptosis in carcinogenesis and tumour malignancy, using different antibodies (Kumaraguruparan et al, 2006;Yang et al, 2006). A recent study using an antibody against the active caspase-3 has not found a statistically significant correlation with the clinicopathological parameters considered (Bongiovanni et al, 2014).…”

“…As far as we know, there is only a single study on cleaved caspase-3 expression in CMGT (Bongiovanni et al, 2014), and only few studies have investigated the possible relationship between apoptosis and proliferation in these tumours. The goal of the present work was to elucidate the relationship between apoptosis and tumour proliferation in CMGT.…”