To investigate the potential oncogenic role of eIF3a in intestinal epithelial cells, we first examined its expression profile in the human colon cancer cell line CaCo-2 that can differentiate into intestine like epithelial cells and lose cancer phenotype upon confluency as indicated by expression of brush-border enzymes such as alkaline phosphatase (AP) and sucrase, differentiation markers of colon epithelial cells [27,39]. This evidence concerns the gene EIF3A and cancer.