Abstract
Abstract Objectives CD146 is an adhesive molecule that was originally reported on malignant melanoma cells as a protein crucial for cell adhesion. It is now known that high expression of the CD146 protein is not only characteristic of melanoma, but it occurs on a number of cancers, contributing to worse prognosis and increased aggressiveness. Independent in vitro studies in breast cancer have shown that CD146 protein alone can induce a change in epithelial to mesenchymal transcriptional profile, which is the basis of the tumor aggressiveness and metastasis. Methods In the following work, the correlation coefficients were analyzed between the genes of the mesenchymal profile and the CD146 gene in 10 independent transcriptomic data of breast cancer patients. Results The analysis confirmed the relationship between CD146 expression and mesenchymal profile genes, pointing VIMENTIN as the gene which expression is most strongly correlated with the CD146, suggesting that both genes, CD146 and VIM may be directly controlled by the same mechanism or regulate one another. Conclusions The analysis points a potential route for research on the CD146 gene expression, which may lead to understanding of its regulation in breast cancer, contributing to the development of new therapeutic strategies targeting highly metastatic breast cancer cells.
Highlights
CD146 was initially described on melanoma cells as an adhesion molecule contributing to the invasiveness of cancer cells
In vitro and in vivo data determined that CD146 introduction into breast cancer cells with epithelial characteristics trigger the changes in transcriptional profile leading to epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) [2, 3]
We analyzed the correlation between CD146 gene expression and 11 mesenchymal profile genes in dataset composed of 51 breast cancer cell lines (Table 1B)
Summary
CD146 was initially described on melanoma cells as an adhesion molecule contributing to the invasiveness of cancer cells. Regardless of the mechanism regulating the expression of CD146, the research data indicates that overexpression of this protein in vitro triggers signaling to lead to an alteration in the epithelial expression profile into the mesenchymal one in breast cancer cells [2]. In line with this observation, we show here that CD146 expression is significantly correlated with mesenchymal markers in several independent breast cancer patient’s transcriptomic datasets. The analysis of the correlation coefficients performed in the current study showed that the VIMENTIN gene is the most strongly correlated mesenchymal marker with CD146, which may indicate that these two genes are regulated directly by the same overriding mechanism or regulate one another, which may be crucial for the
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