PLAC1 is an independent predictor of poor survival, and promotes cell proliferation and invasion in cervical cancer

Abstract

Placenta-specific protein 1 (PLAC1) is inversely associated with survival in several types of cancer. However, whether PLAC1 is involved in the progression of cervical cancer (CC) remains to be elucidated. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate the prognostic role of PLAC1 in CC by determining the relationship between clinicopathological factors, PLAC1 gene expression and survival prognosis using univariate and multivariate Cox proportional-hazards regression analyses. Similarly, Kaplan-Meier curves were evaluated with the log-rank test. Subsequently, gene set enrichment analysis was performed to compare the highand low-PLAC1 expression phenotypes. Functional studies were further conducted in PLAC1-overexpressing HeLa cells and PLAC1-silenced MS751 cells, and western blotting was performed to determine whether PLAC1 promoted CC progression via epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). The findings demonstrated that high expression of PLAC1 was associated with American Joint Committee on Cancer metastasis pathological score and suggested a poor overall survival. 'mTOR complex 1 signaling', 'interferon α response' and 'hypoxia' were differentially enriched in the high-PLAC1 phenotype. Furthermore, PLAC1 promoted the invasion of CC cells in vitro. E-cadherin expression was decreased in the PLAC1-overexpressing cells, accompanied by increased expression of the mesenchymal markers, Vimentin, MMP2 and Slug, and the opposite effects were observed in PLAC1-silenced cells. Taken together, the present results indicated that high expression of PLAC1 was associated with poor survival and PLAC1 promoted metastasis via EMT in CC.

Effects of Fractionated Radiation Exposure on Vimentin Expression in Cervical Cancers: Analysis of Association with Cancer Stem Cell Response and Short-Term Prognosis

“…The prognostic value of vimentin expression determined in tumor cells by immunohistochemistry before treatment was previously shown using univariate and multivariate analyses of overall and disease-free survival of patients with squamous cell CC and adenocarcinoma of the uterine cervix [ 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ]. In addition, there have been growing data on the association of other EMT markers, including the transcription factors Snail, Slug, Twist, ZEB1, etc., and EMT-related molecules with poor prognosis of long-term clinical outcome [ 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 ]; at the same time, inhibitors or negative modulators of EMT were found to be factors of favorable prognosis of CC patients [ 47 , 48 ]. Taking into account these data, it made sense to analyze the informativeness of the vimentin expression assessment in non-invasive material of scrapings from the cervix before treatment to predict the clinical outcome.…”

Elevated INHBA Promotes Tumor Progression of Cervical Cancer

“…The Transwell migration and invasion assays were performed as previously described. 9 The migrated or invaded cells were photographed under a light microscope, and the cell numbers were counted in five random fields per chamber.…”

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“…Recent studies confirmed its expression in more than 74 cancer cell lines (Silva et al, 2007;Mahmoudian et al, 2019). Including prostate (Ghods et al, 2014a;Nejadmoghaddam et al, 2017), breast (Koslowski et al, 2007;Li et al, 2018), uterus (Devor et al, 2014), cervix (Chen et al, 2021), ovary (Devor et al, 2017). In addition to, lung , liver (Wu et al, 2017), colon (Ren et al, 2020), gastric (Liu et al, 2021), pancreatic cancers (Yin et al, 2017), nasopharyngeal carcinomas (Lin et al, 2021), melanoma (Mahmoudi et al, 2020), and osteosarcoma (Yu et al, 2021).…”