Abstract
Background
Stemness and chemoresistance contribute to cervical cancer recurrence and metastasis. It is meaningful to develop alternative targets for eliminating cancer stem cells (CSCs) properties, suppressing metastasis, and alleviating chemoresistance in cervical cancer. This study clarifies the role of CENPK in cervical cancer stemness and chemoresistance and its clinical significance in cancer progression.
Methods
Human cervical cancer cell lines, xenografts, and clinical samples were used for expression and functional analysis. CENPK expression in cervical cancer was analyzed by bioinformatics based on a microarray and TCGA database and immunohistochemistry based on 119 paraffin-embedded cervical cancer specimens and 35 paraffin-embedded adjacent normal tissues in a tissue chip.
Results
CENPK served as an oncogene by promoting CSCs properties, DNA damage repair, epithelial-mesenchymal transition and DNA replication, thus inducing cisplatin/carboplatin resistance, cell metastasis and proliferation in cervical cancer. Intriguingly, targeting CENPK markedly prolonged the survival time of cervical cancer-bearing mice, and improved chemotherapy sensitivity of cervical cancer cells in vivo. CENPK also interacted with tumor suppressor gene SOX6 to activate Wnt signaling and inactivate p53 signaling. CENPK modulated expression of key regulators in CSCs properties, DNA damage repair, epithelial-mesenchymal transition and DNA replication by disrupting SOX6-β-catenin interaction, promoting β-catenin expression and nuclear translocation, and facilitating SOX6-mediated p53 ubiquitination and nuclear export, thus stimulating cervical cancer stemness, chemoresistance, metastasis and proliferation by. Interestingly, the RAD21/SMC3 complex, downstream targets of β-catenin, enhanced CENPK transcription to form a positive regulatory circuit through Wnt signaling. Facilitation of Wnt signaling by iRhom2 further activated the CENPK/SOX6-β-catenin-RAD21/SMC3 loop and conferred cervical cancer progression, suggesting a Wnt-p53 pathway crosstalk. Importantly, CENPK was upregulated in cervical cancer, correlated with cancer recurrence, and independently predicted poor patient prognosis.
Conclusions
This work identifies CENPK as a prognostic indicator and highlights targeting of CENPK as a novel strategy in the treatment of cervical cancer.
P4HA2 contributes to cervical cancer progression via inducing epithelial-mesenchymal transition
