Analysis of laminins’ cognate receptors reveals the upregulation of ITGB4 in CCA tissues

      Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) is a rare but highly lethal cancer arising from biliary tract. Its incidence is highest in Northeast, Thailand (about 100 times higher than in western countries), making it a serious public health problem in the country. We previously showed that Laminin, a major matrix protein in the basement membrane, is overexpressed in CCA and contribute to CCA aggressiveness, thus indicating the need to understand the communication between the cancer cell and laminin. Here, we identified potential receptors for relaying signal from laminin to CCA cell using bioinformatic analysis to compare the mRNA expression of 19 laminins’ cognate receptors between CCA and non-cancerous tissues, then verified them by qRT-PCR using CCA tissues from Thai patients. The bioinformatic analyses from two RNA-sequencing databases (Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes and The Cancer Genome Atlas) and ten microarray datasets (the Gene Expression Omnibus database) demonstrated that ITGAV, ITGA2, ITGB1, and ITGB4 mRNAs were significantly and commonly upregulated, while SDC2 was commonly downregulated in CCA when compared to adjacent non-cancerous tissues in all three databases. The qRT-PCR of the CCA tissues from Thai patients confirmed the elevation of ITGB4 in nearly all CCA tissues (29 out of 30 cases), highlighting it as a potential marker for CCA.

Reference

Islam K, Balasubramanian B, Venkatraman S, Puetkasichonpasutha J, Tohtong R, Namwat N, et al. Bioinformatics and qPCR analysis of laminins’ cognate receptors in CCA tissues reveals ITGB4 as a potential biomarker. ScienceAsia 48(2):379-86.