Cellular senescence is a condition in which cell proliferation is inhibited irreversibly. Cellular senescence can be induced by several factors such as telomere shortening, oxygen stress, UV, or oncogenic stimulation. Among them, oncogene-induced senescence is induced by oncogene overexpression. Oncogene-induced senescence was initially considered as a barrier of cancer progression. Recently, however, oncogene-induced senescence could be found in advanced cancer and may have a positive effect on cancer progression.
In present study, we investigated characteristics of senescence cells in colorectal cancers. We examined colorectal cancer tissues and clinicopathological data from 51 patients who underwent colorectal cancer resection at Ajou University Hospital between 2016 and 2017. We performed SA-β-Gal staining and graded according to the degree of staining. The correlation between grade of SA-β-Gal staining and clinicopathological data was analyzed. We also conducted primary culture to investigate the role of tumor senescent cells.
We found that three different staining pattern of senescent cells in colorectal cancer tissues. We obtained no statistical results in the correlation between senescent cells and patient’s data. Although there were no statistical significance between senescent tumor cells and parameters of colorectal cancers, we found senescent tumor cells were more frequently present in early stage of colorectal cancers and in small sized colorectal cancers (p=0.054, p=0.070). Our data suggested that the possibility of correlation between senescent tumor cells and pathogenesis of the colorectal cancers is present.
