MARKERS OF THE PROSTATE BASAL LAYER CELLS ARE EFFECTIVE INDICATORS OF ITS MALIGNANT TRANSFORMATION.

Development of local or general forms of prostate cancer (PC) depends on formation of metastasis the biological nature of which is based on epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT). ÅÌÒ presents highly conservative reversible program that is maintained by specific transcription factors which suppress E-cadherin expression and support production of mesenchymal polarity factors. The goal of this work was to study the functionally distinct markers in malignant prostate tissue of patients with prostate cancer using the histological evaluation, reverse polymerase chain reaction and immunobloting. Our results showed that mostly evident alterations in prostate tissue of patients with prostate cancer were associated with the cells of basal layer. Expression levels of the markers of this layer: Å-cadherin and ÑK5, were decreased, while that of AMACR — increased. These results support an idea that the basal cells are primarily targeted during transformation and acquired the luminal phenotype in the course of the following differentiation. The functional analysis of these results may be performed in future using selected prostate cancer stem cells.