The insulin-like growth factor binding proteins 3 and 7 are associated with colorectal cancer and liver metastasis.

Over the last few decades, a great deal of attention has been directed to the IGF system for its vital role in regulating cell and tissue survival, growth and differentiation. The insulin-like growth factor binding proteins (IGFBPs), a main constituent of this system, have been implicated in the tumorigenesis of colorectal cancer (CRC). In this study, we intended to shed more light on two essential members; IGFBP3 as representative for the six main IGFBPs and IGFBP7 to represent their related proteins (IGFBP-rps). Our experiments on silencing IGFBP3 or IGFBP7 in the two human CRC cell lines SW480, Caco2, and in the rat CRC cell line CC531 show reduced proliferation, colony formation, and for IGFBP3, also reduced migration. The expression of both genes in 68 human CRC samples was higher in UICC stages II and III than in stages I and IV. Additionally, IGFBP3 was negatively correlated with age (p = 0.05) and positively related to IGFBP7 expression (p = 0.0001). Further, in a liver metastasis experiment, the expression of both genes was drastically increased in response to early metastatic growth in vivo. Since these high levels returned gradually to normal thereafter, it could be assumed that the up-regulation of IGFBPs is vital during the process of homing into the liver and early metastatic dissemination. Our results indicate that IGFBP3 and 7 cannot be simply considered as tumor suppressors but have additional properties, which become evident only during cancer progression and metastasis formation.