STAT3 and benign prostatic hyperplasia: In order to show that the persistent expression of activated STAT3 was required for the survival of the transfected cells, as we have previously shown for hormone-refractory prostate cancer cells lines [11,12], we transfected pIRES-S3c into human BPH-1 cells [38] for studies with antisense STAT3 oligonucleotides.