Kinesin family member 2C aggravates the progression of hepatocellular carcinoma and interacts with competing endogenous RNA

Abstract

Kinesin family member 2C (KIF2C), a substantial mitotic regulator, has been verified to exert a malignant function in several cancers. However, its function in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains unclear. In this study, the expression profile of KIF2C in HCC was characterized through the dataset from the TCGA and clinical tissue microarrays containing 220 pairs of resected HCC tissues and adjacent nontumor tissues in our hospital. The results indicated that KIF2C was substantially higher expression in tumor tissues than adjacent nontumor tissues. High expression of KIF2C significantly correlated with large tumor ('5.0 cm) (P =.001) and implied a dismal postoperative overall survival (OS) (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.729; P =.002) in our cohort of patients. Gain and loss of function assays displayed that KIF2C promoted HCC cell proliferation, accelerated cell cycle progression, and impeded apoptosis. By bioinformatic tools and mechanistic investigation, we found that KIF2C interacted with various cell-cycle-related proteins and was significantly involved in growth-promoting pathways. KIF2C upregulated PCNA and CDC20 expression. Subsequently, we investigated the regulation of KIF2C by competing endogenous RNA and elucidated that has-miR-6715a-3p was directly bond to the 3′-untranslated region of KIF2C through dual luciferase assays, thereby inhibiting KIF2C expression. Furthermore, the long noncoding RNA GS1-358P8.4 was found to be a candidate of KIF2C for has-miR-6715a-3p binding. HCC patients with high lncRNA-GS1-358P8.4 expression had shorter OS and relapse-free survival compared to those with low expression, which was accordance with the KIF2C. Taken together, KIC2C aggravated HCC progression, it could serve as a prognostic indicator and confer a novel target for clinical treatment.