Carcinoma of the colon and rectum with deregulation of insulin-like growth factor 2 signaling: clinical and molecular implications. Homo sapiens

We here show that loss of imprinting (LOI) of IGF2 is a frequent and early event in the development of colon cancer and occurs throughout the large intestine. LOI leads to AKT1-dependent activation and suppression of a defined set of genes, many of which are cell cycle related. Our results further showed that IGF2 induces non-canonical wnt signaling. We hypothesize that IGF2 and Wnt5a cooperate in cancer progression. LOI is an attractive target for tumor prevention or targeted therapy. Overall design: This is a comparison of colon cancer samples with (LOI) and without (ROI) loss of imprining of IGF2. All cases were from the sigmoid colon and were in UICC tumor stage pT2 N0 M0.