Department of Surgery and Cancer Research Institute, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Republic of Korea.
Mol Oncol. 2011 Dec;5(6):538-44. doi: 10.1016/j.molonc.2011.08.002. Epub 2011 Aug 8.
The association between nuclear factor I/B (NFIB) gene and triple negative breast cancer has been previously suggested.
We investigated the relationship between NFIB mRNA and protein expression and molecular subtypes of breast cancer as well as the effect of NFIB silencing on the proliferation and apoptosis of breast cancer cells. Also, the clinical importance of NFIB expression was investigated in 163 breast cancer patients.
By using 20 frozen human breast cancer tissues and various breast cancer cell lines, we observed a significant high level of NFIB mRNA level in triple negative breast cancer. NFIB protein was upregulated in ER negative breast cancer tissues but the expression level was similar between HER2 subtype and triple negative subtype. The clinical significance of NFIB was further examined in a tissue microarray from 163 invasive breast cancer patients, and the immunohistochemistry results showed a significant association between NFIB expression and nuclear grade, ER, and HER2 expression status. NFIB positive tumors were more likely to have high nuclear grade, ER negativity and HER2 over-expression. HCC1954 cells transfected with siRNA against NFIB showed a significant reduction in cell proliferation and increase in apoptotic signaling pathway.
Our results show a potential role of NFIB as a novel target in ER negative breast cancers.
核因子 I/B（NFIB）基因与三阴性乳腺癌之间的关联先前已被提出。
我们研究了 NFIB mRNA 和蛋白表达与乳腺癌分子亚型之间的关系，以及 NFIB 沉默对乳腺癌细胞增殖和凋亡的影响。此外，我们还在 163 名乳腺癌患者中研究了 NFIB 表达的临床重要性。
通过使用 20 份冷冻人乳腺癌组织和各种乳腺癌细胞系，我们观察到三阴性乳腺癌中 NFIB mRNA 水平显著升高。NFIB 蛋白在 ER 阴性乳腺癌组织中上调，但在 HER2 亚型和三阴性亚型之间表达水平相似。我们在 163 例浸润性乳腺癌患者的组织微阵列中进一步研究了 NFIB 的临床意义，免疫组化结果表明 NFIB 表达与核分级、ER 和 HER2 表达状态之间存在显著关联。NFIB 阳性肿瘤更有可能具有高核分级、ER 阴性和 HER2 过表达。用针对 NFIB 的 siRNA 转染 HCC1954 细胞后，细胞增殖显著减少，凋亡信号通路增加。
我们的结果表明 NFIB 作为 ER 阴性乳腺癌的一个新的潜在靶点。
