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Purpose: We examined the variation in gene expression profiles of prostate cancer caused by zone specific genes., Materials and Methods: Ten normal central zone, 10 transition zone (benign prostatic hyperplasia) and 6 normal peripheral zone tissues from radical retropubic prostatectomies were compared to each other and to 12 peripheral zone Gleason grade 4/5 cancers. Test chips and HuGeneFL6800 (Affymetrix, Inc., Santa Clara, California) chips were used to assay the transcribed genes. Data were obtained with the Microarray Suite Version 4.0.1 (Affymetrix, Inc.) and analyzed statistically., Results: Substantially different gene expression profiles were found depending upon which of the 3 zonal tissues were used as a control. All 3 profiles were compared for efficiency (ability to locate genes) and for robustness (the magnitude of difference between the control and the Gleason grade 4/5 tissue). Microscopically normal appearing peripheral zone tissue at the gene level shows many characteristics of Gleason grade 4/5 cancer., Conclusions: Gene expression profiles of prostate cancer are affected by the zonal location of the control tissue and the cancer.

Purpose: Recent studies have shown that hepsin, a serine protease, is over expressed in prostate cancers, implicating hepsin activity in tumor invasion. Using microarray technology we have previously identified 22 genes that were up-regulated in high grade prostate cancers compared with benign prostatic hyperplasia. Of them hepsin was the most differentially over expressed. In the current report we compare hepsin to maspin (BD Transduction Laboratories, San Diego, California), a serine protease inhibitor (serpin), to measure the balance between levels of serine proteases and serpins, which are considered to be a critical determinant of net proteolytic activity., Materials and Methods: We combined the technique of laser capture microdissection with gene expression monitoring by micro-array analysis to investigate the gene expression profiles of prostate cells of different histological types. We also studied maspin immunohistochemically., Results: We observed that hepsin as well as 7 of 22 previously reported up-regulated genes demonstrated a pattern of increasing expression with increasing malignant phenotype. In contrast, the expression of maspin (a serpin) decreased with increasing malignancy of prostate cancers. Using immunohistochemistry we observed that maspin protein is expressed strongly in benign prostatic tissues and slightly in grade 3 prostate cancers, and is absent in grade 4/5 cancers., Conclusions: We conclude that the increased ratio of hepsin-to-maspin may have an important role in prostate cancer progression and invasion.