Prognostic significance of PLIN1 expression in human breast cancer

// Cefan Zhou 1, 2 , Ming Wang 3 , Li Zhou 4 , Yi Zhang 1 , Weiyong Liu 5 , Wenying Qin 1 , Rong He 1 , Yang Lu 1 , Yefu Wang 2 , Xing-Zhen Chen 1, 6 , Jingfeng Tang 1 1 Institute of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Provincial Cooperative Innovation Center, College of Bioengineering, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China 2 The State Key Laboratory of Virology, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China 3 Department of Clinical Laboratory, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China 4 Animal Biosafety Level III Laboratory at the Center for Animal Experiment, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China 5 Department of Clinical Laboratory, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China 6 Membrane Protein Disease Research Group, Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada Correspondence to: Jingfeng Tang, email: Jingfeng_HUT@163.com Keywords: perilipin-1, Kaplan-Meier analysis, meta analysis, tumor suppressor, biomarker Received: March 13, 2016      Accepted: May 13, 2016      Published: June 23, 2016 ABSTRACT Breast cancer is a heterogeneous disease associated with diverse clinical, biological and molecular features, presenting huge challenges for prognosis and treatment. Here we found that perilipin-1 (PLIN1) mRNA expression is significantly downregulated in human breast cancer. Kaplan-Meier analysis indicated that patients presenting with reduced PLIN1 expression exhibited poorer overall metastatic relapse-free survival ( p = 0.03). Further Cox proportional hazard models analysis revealed that the reduced expression of PLIN1 is an independent predictor of overall survival in estrogen receptor positive ( p < 0.0001, HR = 0.87, 95% CI = 0.81–0.92, N = 3,600) and luminal A-subtype ( p = 0.02, HR = 0.88, 95% CI = 0.78–0.98, N = 1,469) breast cancer patients. We also demonstrated that the exogenous expression of PLIN1 in human breast cancer MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cells significantly inhibits cell proliferation, migration, invasion and in vivo tumorigenesis in mice. Together, these data provide novel insights into a prognostic significance of PLIN1 in human breast cancer and reveal a potentially new gene therapy target for breast cancer.