1. ¹Department of Pathology, Erasmus University Hospital, Brussels, Belgium
2. ²Laboratory of Molecular Virology, Faculty of Medicine; Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
3. ³Laboratory of Histopathology, Faculty of Medicine; Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
4. ⁴Division of Clinical Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Pediatrics, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
5. ⁵Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, Brussels, Belgium

Correspondence: Dr. Christine Decaestecker, Laboratory of Histopathology, Faculty of Medicine, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 808 route de Lennik, 1070 Brussels, Belgium. E-mail: cdecaes@ulb.ac.be

Received 22 January 2001.

Abstract

It has been previously shown that S100A2 is down-regulated in tumor cells and can be considered a tumor suppressor. We have recently shown that this down-regulation can be observed particularly in epithelial tissue, where S100A2 expression decreases remarkably in tumors as compared with normal specimens. In the present paper we investigate whether S100A2 could play a tumor-suppressor role in certain epithelial tissues by acting at the cell migration level. To this end, we made use of five in vitro human head and neck squamous cell carcinoma lines in which we characterized S100A2 expression at both RNA and protein level. To characterize the influence of S100A2 on cell kinetic and cell motility features, we used two complementary approaches involving specific antisense oligonucleotides and the addition of S100A2 to the culture media. The different expression analyses gave a coherent demonstration of the fact that the FADU and the RPMI-2650 cell lines exhibit high and low levels of S100A2 expression, respectively. Antisense oligonucleotides (in FADU) and extracellular treatments (in RPMI) showed that, for these two models, S100A2 had a clear inhibitory influence on cell motility while modifying the cell kinetic parameters only slightly. These effects seem to be related, at least in part, to a modification in the polymerization/depolymerization dynamics of the actin microfilamentary cytoskeleton. Furthermore, we found evidence of the presence of the receptor for advanced glycation end-products (RAGE) in RPMI cells, which may act as a receptor for extracellular S100A2. The present study therefore presents experimentally based evidence showing that S100A2 could play a tumor-suppressor role in certain epithelial tissues by restraining cell migration features, at least in the case of head and neck squamous cell carcinomas.