DSCAML1 is differentially expressed in ovarian cancers.
Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death for women in the United States and the leading cause of death from a gynecologic cancer for women in the developed world (1, 2). We compared the transcriptional profiles of benign ovarian tissues to that ovarian tumors isolated from women diagnosed with ovarian cancer using published datasets (3, 4) and found that the Down Syndrome cell adhesion molecule-like 1, or DSCAML1 (5) was one of the genes whose expression was most different between ovarian tumor and healthy ovarian tissue using separate datasets. This was consistent between two independent datasets analyzed. This is the first report of differential expression of DSCAML1 in ovarian cancers. DSCAML1 should be evaluated for its ability to initiate, or maintain the tumorigenic state in human ovarian cancer.