FGF1 signaling regulates self-renewal of glioblastoma stem cells through activation of aurora a kinase

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly malignant brain tumor. The GBM tumor mass contains a unique cell population, GBM stem cells (GBM-SCs), which possess the self-renewal, tumor initiating and tumor progression. FGF1B is the major transcriptional variant of FGF1 in GBM. In our recent study, we demonstrated the FGF1B transcript is up-regulated in self-renewing GBM cells. In order to study GBM-SCs, we developed an approach to isolate GBM-SCs by using FGF1B promoter-driven GFP reporter (F1BGFP). We showed that F1BGFP(+) GBM cells exhibit higher phosphorylation levels of FGFR and AurA than F1BGFP(-) cells, indicating the activation of FGFR and AurA. In this research highlight, we summarized the role of FGF1 signaling and AurA in tumorigenesis. In addition, we also suggested that FGF1-FGFR-AurA cascade regulates GBM-SCs, which may enable development of target-based therapy that act against the GBM-SCs.