Up-regulation of fibroblast growth factor 3 is associated with tumor metastasis and recurrence in human hepatocellular carcinoma

Recently, we established a hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell line (named H4-M) from a metastatic HCC tumor. In H4-M, a marker chromosome containing a homogeneously staining region (hsr) was identified by cytogenetic analysis. The hsr was characterized by chromosome microdissection and the result showed that the hsr was composed of DNA sequence from 11q13. Oncogenes CCND1 and FGF3 were localized within the complicon and overexpressions of CCND1 and FGF3 were confirmed by Northern blot analysis. Clinical significance of FGF3 overexpression was studied by immunohistochemistry (IHC) using an HCC tissue microarray (TMA) containing 60 pairs of primary/metastatic HCCs and 30 pairs of primary/recurrent HCCs. TMA study showed that overexpression of FGF3 was significantly associated with HCC metastasis and recurrence ( p < 0.01 ) , suggesting that up-regulation of FGF3 may play an important role in HCC metastasis and recurrence.