Int J Biol Sci 2015; 11(2):230-237. doi:10.7150/ijbs.9193 This issue Cite
Research Paper
1. Institute of Neurology, Guangdong Medical College, Zhanjiang, China.
2. Guangdong Key Laboratory of Age-Related Cardiac and Cerebral Diseases, Affiliated Hospital of Guangdong Medical College, Zhanjiang, China.
3. Department of Neurosurgery, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, China.
† These authors contributed equally to this work.
Glioma is the most common type of primary intracranial tumor and is highly lethal due to its pathogenetic location, high invasiveness, and poor prognosis. Even combined surgery and chemoradiotherapy do not effectively rescue glioma patients. Molecular target therapy is considered a safe and promising therapy for glioma. The identification of a novel, effective target protein in gliomas is of great interest. We found that PAK5 was highly expressed in the tumor tissues of glioma patients and human glioma cell lines. We then used a lentivirus-delivered short hairpin RNA to stably silence PAK5 expression in glioma cells and explore its influence. The results showed that the inhibition of PAK5 reduced cell viability and delayed the cell cycle at the G0/G1 phase in the glioma cells with PAK5 high expression. In addition, silencing PAK5 expression in U87 cells weakened their colony formation ability and in vivo tumorigenesis ability. Further studies demonstrated that PAK5 inhibition led to an increase in cleaved caspase 3 and a decrease in β-catenin. In conclusion, our results suggest that the inhibition of PAK5 by RNA interference might efficiently suppress tumor development of glioma cells with PAK5 high expression. This finding provides a novel, promising therapeutic target for glioma treatment.
Keywords: glioma, PAK5, tumor development, RNA interference, cell cycle arrest