Analysis of the characteristics of chemotherapy-resistant renal cell carcinomas based on global transcriptional analysis of their tissues and cell lines

Starvation-resistant renal cell carcinoma (RCC) cell lines are considered dormant-state cells that survive even under glucose starvation. The cellular biological and global transcriptional analysis using these cells identified potential markers of chemotherapy-resistant RCC and therapeutic agent candidates. Recently, we showed that ARL4C was a predictive biomarker for poor prognosis in patients with chemotherapy-resistant RCC by the global transcriptional analysis of patient primary tissues. The objective of this study was to identify the characteristics of chemotherapy-resistant RCC by the global transcriptional analysis of primary tissues of patients with RCC and RCC cell lines. The connective global transcriptional analysis showed that two starvation-resistant RCC cell lines, SW839 and KMRC-1, were strongly correlated to tissues of patients with chemotherapy-resistant RCC and showed high expressions of invasive- and proliferation-related genes. We found fibronectin (FN1) expression was a predictive biomarker in some patients with chemotherapy-resistant RCC, which especially correlated with two starvation-resistant RCC cell lines. These results indicate these cell lines emulate chemotherapy-resistant RCC and might be useful in the search for markers to predict poor prognosis and in the development of therapeutic agents and their index markers for chemotherapy-resistant RCCs.