Hepatoma upregulated protein expression is involved in the pathogenesis of human breast carcinogenesis

Abstract

In the last decade, the overexpression of hepatoma upregulated protein (HURP) has been reported in hepatocellular carcinoma, adrenocortical tumors and urogenital carcinoma. However, the role of HURP in breast cancer remains unknown. In the present study, a comprehensive analysis was performed to examine the HURP expression level in 43 breast cancer tumor samples and paired adjacent normal tissues. The correlation between the HURP expression level and the clinicopathological characteristics was evaluated. The role of HURP in breast cancer was investigated by quantitative polymerase chain reaction, western blot analysis and cell proliferation assays. HURP expression was found to be significantly increased in the breast cancer samples. The HURP expression level was higher in the tumors with advanced-grade metastasis and was strongly associated with tumor-node-metastasis staging (P=0.003). Transfection and cell proliferation assays suggested that the suppression of HURP expression or the interference in HURP activity in the breast cancer cells inhibited cell proliferation significantly. These data suggest that HURP is associated with the degree of malignancy and the proliferation of breast cancer. HURP could be a tumor biomarker for prognosis and a potential therapeutic drug target for human breast cancer.

Overexpression of HURP mRNA in head and neck carcinoma and association with in�vitro response to vinorelbine

“…This is further supported by the observation that knockdown of HURP leads to inhibition of proliferation of human pharyngeal squamous carcinoma cells (37). The tumorigenic activity of HURP has also been reported in breast cancer (24), hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) (25) and ATC (30,38) indicating its important role in human cancer development.…”

“…HURP protein is encoded by HURP or DLGAP5 (Disks large-associated protein 5) gene, located on chromosome 14q22.3. HURP is a MAP protein associated with kinetochore MTs, that plays a critical role in spindle assembly, chromosome congression, alignment and segregation (20)(21)(22)(23) and has a previously reported to be involved in tumorigenesis (24,25). Hence, it can be hypothesised that HURP expression may predict response to vinorelbine in cancer cells.…”

HURP localization in metaphase is the result of a multi-step process requiring its phosphorylation at Ser627 residue

“…HURP (Hepatoma Upregulated Protein) was identified as a protein overexpressed in hepatocellular carcinoma, representing a potential oncogene (Tsou et al, 2003). HURP is overexpressed in many other cancer types such as bladder, breast, glioblastoma, prostate and non-small cell lung cancer and has been proposed as a new cancer biomarker (Chen et al, 2014;Eissa et al, 2014;Stangeland et al, 2015;Espinoza et al, 2016;Tagal et al, 2017).…”

HURP facilitates spindle assembly by stabilizing microtubules and working synergistically with TPX2

“…Here, we hypothesized that the hepatoma upregulated protein (HURP) plays a role in branching MT nucleation. HURP is another SAF 17,18 , first identified in human hepatocellular carcinoma, and has been implicated in a variety of cancers as a putative oncogene [19][20][21][22][23] . Studies in human cells have demonstrated that HURP is a MT-bundling protein that localizes predominantly to kinetochore fibers (k-fibers) and is important in k-fiber stability and chromosome congression 18,24,25 .…”