National Research Centre of Medical Sciences of I.R. IRAN
Abstract
Telomerase activation is one of the main pathways to immortalize cancer
cells. In many kinds of cancer cells, this special reverse
transcriptase stabilizes and elongates telomeres and prevents telomere
erosion that naturally occurs in every cell division. Esophageal cancer
is the fifth most frequent cause of cancer death worldwide, and is
highly associated with alcohol, smoking, cultural habits, and
environmental factors. Telomerase has been suggested as a tumor marker
and a molecular target for drug design in several kinds of cancers. In
this work telomerase activation was inspected among Iranian patients
with Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma (ESCC), and detected in 90% of
samples of different stages. This may be an indication that telomerase
activation happens in an initial step in the development of ESCC.
Although there is no correlation between telomerase activity and the
progress of ESCC, it could be considered as a good tumor marker in
ESCC. Telomerase activity te! sts are suggested for screening purposes
in high risk areas for ESCC, which can be easily done on a small amount
of scrapped samples of esophageal mucosa. It is also possible that ESCC
results from incomplete differentiation or a failure in telomerase gene
switching off that normally occurs during the differentiation of
esophageal epithelial cells
