Pro-inflammatory cytokines are important mediators of cutaneous cellular activities during many oral mucosal diseases. IHOK culture model transfected by E6/E7 genes provide further evidence for the role of HPV in tumorogenesis. It is interesting to investigate cytokine expression of immortalized human oral keratinocyte(IHOK). The purpose of this study were to analysis cytokine mRNA expression levels of NHOK and IHOK by RT-PCR. IHOK showed about 5 fold increases of IL-6 compared with NHOK, while TNF-α was the lowest. It suggested that immortalization of NHOK with E6/E7 could result in elevated expression of IL-6, and IHOK be in the intermediate stage of oral carcinogenesis.

Studies to evaluate distribution of markers in normal keratinocyte and their immortalized keratinocyte are appropriate to evaluate the normal and preneoplastic lesion of oral cancers as biochemical and cytochemical changes associate with tumorigenesis being not completely understood. Complementary DNA microarray containing 6000 sequence -verified cDNA elements was used to systematically characterize the variation in gene expression patterns of NHOK cells vs. immortalized keratinocyte by HPV16 E6-E7(IHOK). Examination of gene expression that is 85 clones cDNAs exhibits greater than 2 fold overexpression in NHOK probes relative to IHOK probe, 147 cDNAs reveal greater 2 fold overexpression in IHOK relative to NHOK probe.The high similarity in gene expression (96.5%) between IHOK and NHOK cells suggests that only an additional 232/6720 (3.5%) of the genome is differentially gene activated during HPV16 immoratlized keratinocyte growth and differentiation. Examination of gene expression that differs between NHOK and IHOK cellsapprear to be related to : cell adhesion & recognition, cell cycle regulator, apoptosis, transciption factors, growth factors and therir receptors, cytoskeletal and extracellular matrix proteins, signal transduction modulators and effectors, and miscellaneous. The gene expression of cell recognition factor such as endothelin 1, collagen IV, fibronectin, and SPR1 in IHOK were upregulated. Distinct or duplicated cDNA clones representing the same gene were typically clustered in adjacent rows in the clustered gene map. Therefore the differentially expressed and identified genes should be informative in studying oral epithelial cell carcinogenesis and such studies should foster the research of molecular markers allowing to assess the phenotypeof malignant epithelial tumor.