Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1A (HIF1A) Related to Thermoradioresistancy of Advanced Cervical Cancers

Abstract

Microarray profiling is a powerful approach to identify individual genes that may have important functions of a neoplasm. To identify a set of genes related to thermoradioresistancy of cervical carcinoma, we investigated a total of 19 patients with Stage IIIA to Stage IVB cervical cancer who underwent definitive thermoradiotherapy between May 1995 and August 2001. We compared the expression profiles of 8 thermoradiosensitive and 11 thermoradioresistant tumors obtained by punch biopsy before treatment using a cDNA microarray consisting of 23, 040 human genes. We selected 35 genes on the basis of a clustering analysis. One of these genes in thermoradioresistant tumors was already known to be associated with hypoxia-inducible factor 1A (HIF1A) that regulates the expression of a variety of genes encoding proteins related to angiogenesis and to anaerobic metabolism of cells exposed to hypoxic stress.
These results suggested that HIF1A gene might play a role of thermoradioresistancy in advanced-stage cervical carcinoma.