Facilitates chromatin transcription complex is a marker and target of aggressive cancers with lower survival rates
The Facilitates Chromatin Transcription (FACT) is involved in chromatin remodeling during transcription, replication and DNA repair and is considered to be an ubiquitously expressed complex that has no known associations with any disease. However, we discovered that FACT is expressed in very limited number of cells of adult mammalian organism, mostly presented by stem and undifferentiated cells. Here, we show that FACT is present in poorly differentiated aggressive cancers with an overall low survival rate. FACT acts as an "accelerator" of tumor transformation. It cannot drive transformation like an oncogene, but it increases the efficiency of oncogene-induced transformation. FACT expressing cancer cells cannot grow in the absence of FACT possibly due to the FACT involvement in selective chromatin remodeling of genes that stimulate proliferation, inhibit cell death and differentiation and that are induced in response to cell stress.  We propose that FACT is a marker of an aggressive cancer phenotype and Patients with FACT-positive tumors are noted for an overall poorer survival rate. FACT expression in primary tumors may be used as a predictor of metastatic disease. FACT may also be used as a target of anti-cancer therapy because tumor cells expressing FACT are dependent on FACT function, while normal cells either do not express FACT or are not sensitive to FACT inhibition. Overall design: Examination of SSRP1 binding sites in HT1080 cells, 3 replicates of untreated cells and 3 replicates of curaxin-treated cells, each with 3 replicate input.