Abstract
Early diagnosis and treatment in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is still a challenge worldwide. The poor survival of PDAC patients mainly due to early metastasis when first diagnosed and lack of prognostic biomarker. Ribosomal protein L15 (RPL15), an RNA-binding protein, is a component of ribosomal 60S subunit. It was reported that RPL15 is dysregulated in various type of cancers. However, little is known about the role of RPL15 in PDAC carcinogenesis and progression. Herein, we clarified RPL15 expression status may serve as an independent prognostic biomarker in three independent PDAC patient cohorts. We found that RPL15 was dramatically decreased in PDAC tissues and cell lines. The high expression of RPL15 was inversely correlated with TNM stage, histological differentiation, T classification and vascular invasion. Low expression of RPL15 was significantly associated with poor overall survival of PDAC patients. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the reduction of RPL15 may promote invasion ability of pancreatic cell by inducing EMT process. In conclusion, decreased RPL15 expression is associated with invasiveness of PDAC cells, and RPL15 expression status may serve as a reliable prognostic biomarker in PDAC patients.
Highlights
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most malignant and lethal cancers with increasing incidence and mortality worldwide [1]
Data from The Human Protein Atlas website demonstrated that Ribosomal protein L15 (RPL15) protein was not detected in most pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) compared with normal pancreas
These results indicated that both the mRNA and protein level of RPL15 were significantly downregulated in PDAC tissues
Summary
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most malignant and lethal cancers with increasing incidence and mortality worldwide [1]. It is the fourth and sixth leading cause of cancer-related deaths in USA and China, respectively [2, 3]. Among all pancreatic cancer cases, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) accounts for approximately 85%. A mass of efforts was made to improve the diagnosis and treatment of PDAC, it is still a refractory disease with 5-year survival rate approximately 5% and a median survival time (MST) of 6 months [4]. It is urgent to explore the potential mechanism to develop diagnostic and treatment strategy
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