Expression of intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1) during the development of invasion and/or metastasis of gastric carcinoma.

In this study, using two-color flow-cytometric analysis, we examined the expression of histocompatibility locus antigens (HLA) classes I and II, and intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1) in 10 cases of normal gastric mucosa, 13 cases of primary carcinoma on the stomach, 16 cases of metastatic carcinoma from malignant ascites in patients with gastric carcinoma and 14 samples of their cultured carcinoma cells. Compared with normal gastric mucosa, HLA class I were highly expressed in a considerable number of tumor cells in each experimental group. The expression of HLA class II tended to reduce in the order of normal gastric mucosa, primary gastric carcinoma and peritoneal-effusion-associated carcinoma. Altogether, 85.7% of cases of cultured tumor cells showed abrogation and loss of HLA class II. The ICAM-1 molecule was not detected on normal gastric epithelial cells. In few cases, carcinoma cells from large volumes of tumor located in the stomach showed detectable amounts of ICAM-1. On the other hand, all of the metastatic carcinoma cells from peritoneal effusions showed a high level of expression of the ICAM-1 molecule. The expression of ICAM-1 on adenocarcinoma cells was maintained and/or augmented by in vitro cultivation with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL). Furthermore, two-color fluorescence-activated cell sorting analysis of TIL revealed that significant correlation was observed between the expression of ICAM-1 and the degree of TIL, composed mainly of CD3+ T cells including CD8+CD11b-, CD8+CD28+, CD8+S6F1+ and CD4+Leu8+, and CD57+CD16- and CD57+CD16+ NK cells, and HLA-DR+LeuM3+ macrophages.