Transcriptomic study of the mechanism of anoikis resistance in CAL27 cells.

Normal epithelial cells rapidly suffer with apoptosis when they lose contact with the extracellular matrix (ECM), which is termed as anoikis. However, cancer cells could tend to develop an ability that resists to anoikis. This acquired ability is termed as anoikis resistance. Cancer cells, with anoikis resistance, could spread to distant tissues or organs via the peripheral circulatory system and cause cancer metastasis. Thus, inhibition of anoikis resistance would block the metastatic ability in cancer cells. In this study, we obtained anoikis-resistant CAL27 cells using suspension culture approach. RNA-Seq technique was used to make a deep transcriptional analysis between CAL27 cells and anoikis-resistant CAL27 cells, which helped us to obtain a large number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between these two different kinds of cells. This study, for the first time, disclosed the changes in transcriptional level of anoikis-resistant head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cells.