Acetylated HOXB9 at lysine 27 is of differential diagnostic value in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

Abstract

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the ninth most common human malignancy and the sixth leading cause of cancer-related death in China. AcK27-HOXB9 is a newly identified HOXB9 post-transcriptional modification that can predict the outcome in lung adenocarcinoma and colon cancer well. However, the role of AcK27-HOXB9 in PDAC is unclear. The present study aims to investigate the differential diagnostic role of patients with AcK27-HOXB9 PDAC. Tissue microarrays consisting of 162 pancreatic tumor tissue samples from patients with PDAC and paired normal subjects were used to examine HOXB9 and AcK27-HOXB9 levels and localizations by immunohistochemical analysis and Western blot assay, respectively. HOXB9 was upregulated (P<0.0001), and AcK27-HOXB9 (P=0.0023) was downregulated in patients with PDAC. HOXB9 promoted (P=0.0115), while AcK27-HOXB9 (P=0.0279) inhibited PDAC progression. AcK27-HOXB9 predicted favorable outcome in patients with PDAC (P=0.0412). AcK27-HOXB9 also suppressed PDAC cell migration in a cell migration assay. The results of this study showed that HOXB9 promoted and AcK27-HOXB9 suppressed PDAC progression. The determination of ratio between HOXB9 and AcK27-HOXB9 exhibited potential diagnostic value in patients with PDAC.

Keywords

HOXB9 / AcK27-HOXB9 / PDAC

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Nos. 2016YFC1302103 and 2015CB553906), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 81730071, 81230051, 81472734, and 31170711), and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Nos. 7120002 and 7171005). This work was also supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81773199) to Jun Zhan.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Xiaoran Sun, Jiagui Song, Jing Zhang, Jun Zhan, Weigang Fang, and Hongquan Zhang declare that they have no conflicts of interest. All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). Informed consent was obtained from all patients that were included in the study.

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