Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) has an important role not only in liver regeneration buy also in the development of cancer metastasis. It has been known that HGF and its receptor/c-MET are overexpressed in human pancreatic cancer in vivo, compared with the normal pancreas. To examine the propensity of pancreatic cancer to metastasize and its association with poor prognosis, we studied the effects of HGF and c-MET on pancreatic cancer cell growth and invasion in vitro. Dose-dependently, HGF promoted both the growth and invasiveness of pancreatic cancer cells that expressed c-MET; as a chemoattractant, the high gradient of HGF determined the direction of the invasiveness of the cells. No stimulant effect, however, was observed in cancer cells that did not express c-MET. These results suggest that HGF and c-MET may play important roles in human pancreatic cancer cell growth and invasion-metastatic potential.

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