The gastric cancer remains a major cause of death among cancers in the world. In Brazil, are expected around 500 000 new cases in 2012/2013. The origin of stomach cancer, as in others, arises from the accumulation of genetic alterations. Therefore, it is necessary to know which genetic changes are important in triggering the pathogenesis of gastric cancer. We know that the intestinal type develops through well defined stages. The MNU - a known carcinogen - when ingested in oral form at dosages determined triggers development of this histological type of gastric cancer. Based on this knowledge, we conducted an experiment with six specime of Cebus paella, induced to develop intestinal type gastric cancer. The animals consumed 16mg/kg of body weight daily drugs. All pre-neoplasic lesions developed. Due to drug toxicity, only one survived the entire treatment and developed a tumor. Periodic evaluations were made of animals in pre-determined days (the beginning, days 120, 150, 300, 940) during which samples were made of the gastric mucosa. We collected 20 samples of tissue, distributed among normal mucosa, gastritis, dysplasia, metaplasia, and tumor. DNA extracted from these samples for further analyzes of the CDH1 gene. There is no sequence of this gene in the literature for the species under study. So the first step was to get this sequence. Using the initiators constructed from sequences of CDH1 Callithrix jacchus (species phylogenetically closer to C. apella) we get a sequence of 342pb. There is a similarity of 98% with humans, the presence of binding sites for transcription factors like (sp1, Ap2, NF-x, AREB6, Puf and CTF) and the presence of CAAT Box. The sequence has 30 CpG sites could suffer epigenetic regulation. We also performed MSP analysis with specific primers and found that the region analyzed, there was predominance of the unmethylated CDH1 alleles for all samples pre-neoplastic and adenocarcinoma sample is methylated. When we compared these data with immunohistochemistry revealed that only tumor sample did not express the protein cadherin. Our analyzes suggest that methylation of the CDH1 gene plays an important role in gastric tumorigenesis in C. apella. And, from the similarity between sequences, we suggest that the same occurs in humans. This cadherin promoter methylation leads to inactivation of the gene and establishment of gastric adenocarcinomas. The cadherin promoter hypermethylation has been reported in several articles associated with the development of gastric cancer.
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