Several prior studies with alcohol in different cell types are relevant to our findings. Two studies describe EMT changes by alcohol treatment in an immortalized keratinocyte cell line (9 weeks alcohol treatment) (Chamulitrat et al., 2003) or a breast epithelial cell line (7 days of alcohol treatment) (Robson et al., 2006).. Specific mechanisms for EMT were not investigated in either study. In other studies alcohol was found to stimulate cell migration of breast cancer cells (Ke et al., 2006) and endothelial cells (Morrow et al., 2008). Alcohol has also been shown to both activate and inhibit TACE-mediated processing of TNF-α (Zhao et al., 2004, Zhao et al., 2003) and to inhibit EGFR signaling or enhance ErbB2 cell migration (Ma et al., 2005, Ma et al., 2003). Thus, although limited in their investigation of possible mechanisms, these previous studies support our hypothesis for induction of EMT characteristics by alcohol stimulation.
