Figure 5

Effects of U0126, a specific inhibitor of ERK activation on cancer conditioned medium (PANC-1 CM)-induced COX-2 expression in pancreatic stellate cells (PSCs) by Western blot. Following 18-hour culture in 1% serum medium, cells were treated with control medium and PANC-1 CM in the absence and presence of 10 μM U0126 for the indicated times. Equal amounts of protein from the cell lysates were loaded by SDS-PAGE and immunoblotted with COX-2 antibody. The upper panel is a representative western blot and the lower panel shows densitometric analysis of the western blots from the separate experiments. The increase in expression of the COX-2 protein in PSCs in response to PANC-1 CM was abolished by U0126. This figure is representative of three separate experiments.