Lentiviral-mediated short hairpin RNA silencing of APE1 suppresses hepatocellular carcinoma proliferation and migration: A potential therapeutic target for hepatoma treatment.

Apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease-1 (APE1) is a protein involved in DNA repair and transcriptional regulation of gene expression. APE1 expression was reported to be correlated with poor prognosis in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. Based on our previous study, we hypothesized that APE1 may be involved in the metastatic progression of HCC. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the knockdown effect of APE1 using shRNA in HCC and demonstrate that silencing of APE1 in MHCC97-H cells can decrease the oncogenic transforming potential in vitro and reduce the growth of HCC tumor xenografts in vivo. Silencing of APE1 expression decreased the cell proliferation and survival, reduced the cell adhesion ability in Matrigel or fibronectin-coated plates and suppressed the cell migration and invasion in a Transwell assay of HCC cells. In the xenograft study, tumor growth was markedly inhibited in the APE1-silenced group. Silencing of APE1 in MHCC97-H cells decreased the oncogenic transforming potential in vitro and reduced the growth of HCC tumor xenografts in vivo. Inhibition of APE1 may present a novel therapeutic approach for the treatment of HCC.