Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 15, 2025
A Proximal Culture Method to Study Paracrine Signaling Between Cells
Published on: August 28, 2018
SOX11 and Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition in Metastatic Serous Ovarian Cancer
Iason Psilopatis1,2, Jule Ida Schaefer1, Dimitrios Arsenakis3
1Department of Pathology, Medical School, Klinikum Nuremberg, Paracelsus University, 90419 Nuremberg, Germany.
Background:
Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death from gynecological malignancies, with serous carcinoma being the most common histopathologic subtype. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) correlates with increased metastatic potential, whereas the transcription factor SRY-box transcription factor 11 (SOX11) is overexpressed in diverse malignancies.
Methods:
In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the potential role of the immunohistochemical expression of SOX11 in 30 serous ovarian carcinomas in association with E-cadherin and vimentin expression as well as with patients' clinicopathological data.
Results:
Most of the examined cases showed concurrent expression of E-cadherin and vimentin, whereas SOX11 was expressed in a minority of the cases (26.7%). Interestingly, the positive cases more frequently had a metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis compared with the negative cases (p = 0.09), an association, however, of marginal significance. Moreover, there was a negative correlation between E-cadherin and SOX11 expression (p = 0.0077) and a positive correlation between vimentin and SOX11 expression (p = 0.0130).
Conclusions:
The present work, for the first time, provides preliminary evidence of a possible implication of SOX11 overexpression in the promotion of EMT in metastatic serous ovarian cancer, thereby endorsing tumor metastasis.
