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Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 20|pp 8825—8844

ACADS acts as a potential methylation biomarker associated with the proliferation and metastasis of hepatocellular carcinomas

Diyu Chen1,2, Xiaode Feng1, Zhen Lv1, Xiaofeng Xu1, Yuejie Lu1, Wenxuan Wu1, Hao Wu1, Hua Liu1, Linping Cao1, Sunyi Ye3, Jianzhong Chen2, Jian Wu1
  • 1Division of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, Department of Surgery, First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310003, Zhejiang, China
  • 2Institute of Immunology School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
  • 3Department of Urology, The First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China
Received: June 12, 2019Accepted: September 14, 2019Published: October 25, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102292

Copyright © 2019 Chen et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Background: Hepatocellular carcinomas (HCC) constantly rank among the malignancies with the highest death tolls on the global scale. Moreover, HCC are associated with a limited set of therapeutic options. This is particularly true in the case of advanced stage cancers, where long-term survival is uncommon. For the inoperable, advanced HCC patients, chemotherapy is the main modality of treatment. Due to the lack of known molecular targets, the efficacy of the chemotherapy is limited.

Conclusion: These findings clearly indicate that DNA methylation plays a key role in regulating ACADS expression and that it can be a potential therapeutic target for treating HCC.

Materials and methods: A thorough comparative analysis of 282 cancer samples with 47 normal samples from GEO datasets resulted in the observation that that the level of ACADS was significantly downregulated in HCC. Loss-of-function analyses were then conducted to understand the biological function of ACADS in HCC. It was noted that ACADS was involved in the proliferation and metastasis of HCC. Experiments involving the knockdown of DMNT expression led to the discovery that the expression of ACADS in the HCC cells was significantly increased. The TCGA database was then employed to identify tumor tissue samples which showed higher methylation levels at cg01535453, cg08618068, and cg10174836 (which are the target sites of the ACADS CpG islands) as compared with normal liver tissue samples. All these findings indicated that ACADS might be a novel methylation biomarker associated with HCC.