Novel prognostic marker PRMT1 regulates cell growth via downregulation of CDKN1A in HCC

// Jea-Woon Ryu 1, * , Seon-Kyu Kim 1, * , Mi-Young Son 1, 2 , Su-Jin Jeon 1, 2 , Jung-Hwa Oh 3 , Jung Hwa Lim 1 , Sunwha Cho 1 , Cho-Rok Jung 1, 2 , Ryuji Hamamoto 4 , Dae-Soo Kim 1, 2 and Hyun-Soo Cho 1 1 Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea 2 Department of Functional Genomics, Korea University of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea 3 Korea Institute of Toxicology(KIT), Daejeon, Republic of Korea 4 Division of Molecular Modification and Cancer Biology, National Cancer Center, Tokyo, Japan * Authors share co-first authorship Correspondence to: Hyun-Soo Cho, email: chohs@kribb.re.kr Dae-Soo Kim, email: kds2465@kribb.re.kr Keywords: HCC; PRMT1; prognostic marker Received: April 14, 2017      Accepted: December 05, 2017      Published: December 14, 2017 ABSTRACT Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a major type of liver cancer caused by the hepatitis B and C viruses, alcohol and exposure to aflatoxin. For HCC treatment, anticancer drugs have been widely used, but drug resistance in advanced HCC is an important problem, resulting in a continuous need for novel therapeutic targets. Therefore, in this study, we established a screening pipeline based on RNA-seq to screen novel therapeutic/prognostic targets in HCC and identified PRMT1 (Protein Arginine Methyltransferase 1). In the prognostic analysis, the overexpression of PRMT1 was clearly associated with poor prognosis in a number of HCC patient cohorts. Moreover, after PRMT1 knockdown, HCC cell lines exhibited cell growth and spheroid formation suppression, an increase in Sub-G1 cells by FACS analysis, and enrichment of the cell cycle pathway via functional enrichment analysis. With these results, we demonstrated that PRMT1 could be a novel prognostic marker and therapeutic target for HCC therapy.