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Altered expression of forkhead box Q1 (FOXQ1) is observed in various types of human cancers. However, the clinical significance of FOXQ1 expression in gastric cancer (GC) remains largely unknown. The present study aims to explore the clinicopathological significance and prognostic value of FOXQ1 in GC. FOXQ1 messenger RNA (mRNA) and protein expression were determined by quantitative real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction and Western blot in 20 pairs of fresh frozen GC tissues and corresponding noncancerous tissues. Additionally, FOXQ1 expression was analyzed by immunohistochemistry in 158 clinicopathologically characterized GC cases. The correlation of FOXQ1 expression with patients' survival rate was assessed by Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression. Our results showed that the expression levels of FOXQ1 mRNA and protein in GC tissues were both significantly higher than those in non-cancerous tissues. Our results showed that the high expression of FOXQ1 in GC was related to tumor size (P = 0.026), histological grade (P = 0.021), lymph node involvement (P = 0.002), and tumor-node-metastasis stage (P = 0.028). Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that a high expression level of FOXQ1 resulted in a significantly poor prognosis of GC patients. Furthermore, Cox multivariates analysis indicated that FOXQ1 expression level was an independent prognostic factor for the overall survival rate of GC patients. In conclusion, overexpression of FOXQ1 is closely related to progression of GC and might be regarded as an independent predictor of poor prognosis for GC.

Angiogenesis plays an essential role in tumor growth and metastasis and is a promising target for cancer therapy. We characterized the effects of selective CIAPIN1 inhibition on the angiogenesis gastric cancer cell line SGC7901 by stable transfection of CIAPIN1 siRNA. Our study has been shown that CIAPIN1 play the determined role in tumor growth and multidrug resistance. The conditioned media obtained from SGC7901 treated with CIAPIN1 siRNA suppressed in vitro the proliferation, migration and tube formation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells compared with untransfected cells or cells transfected with control vector alone. Furthermore, the stable transfection of CIAPIN1 siRNA inhibited in vivo tumorigenicity and angiogenesis. Our findings support that selective inhibition of CIAPIN1 alone plays an instrumental role on gastric cancer associated angiogenesis.

Antivascular therapy provides a promising method for anticancer therapy. But targeting to gastric cancer vessels is nonselective due in part to the lack of specific cell-surface receptors identified on target vascular cells. Herein we used in vivo screening of phage displayed peptide library to identify some peptides that bind selectively to endothelial cells of human gastric cancer rather than nonendothelial cells. After four rounds of selection, one phage was obtained with a cyclic 7-mer peptide CGNSNPKSC homing to human gastric adenocarcinoma . There was a 4.6 approximately 137.26-fold increase in the number of the selected phage in gastric cancer xenograft in comparision with control organs brain, heart, liver, spleen and kidney. Immunohistochemistry in mouse and human tissue showed that this phage peptide only bind to the endothelial cells of human gastric cancer. This peptide was observed only specific binding to HUVEC not to SGC-7901, Eca-109, LoVo and Hep-G2 by ELISA. The competitive and inhibitory result between the synthetic CGNSNPKSC peptide and the phage displaying the peptide CGNSNPKSC on HUVEC and in vivo was also confirmed its specific binding effect. This peptide may be a possible candidate for targeted drug delivery in antivascular therapy.