Introduction
Bladder cancer is the ninth most common cancer diagnosis worldwide, with more than 330,000 new cases each year and more than 130,000 deaths per year [
1]. At any point in time, 2.7 million people have a history of urinary bladder cancer [
1]. At the initial diagnosis of bladder cancer, 70% of cases are diagnosed as non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) and approximately 30% as muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC). The standard treatment for patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer is radical cystectomy. However, as approximately one-third of patients diagnosed with MIBC have undetected metastases at the time of treatment for the primary tumor and 25% of patients who undergo radical cystectomy present with lymph node involvement at the time of surgery, this ‘gold standard’ only provides 5-year survival in about 50% of patients [
2]. In order to improve these unsatisfactory results, peri-operative chemotherapy has been explored since the 1980s. The updated analysis shows that cisplatin-based neoadjuvant chemotherapy significantly improves overall survival. However, as only about 50% of patients with MIBC will respond to cisplatin-based chemotherapy [
3], there is still an urgent need to further investigate the mechanisms that prevent response to chemotherapy.
MiRNAs are endogenous, non-coding RNA molecules of approximately 19–25 nucleotides in length. Most miRNAs represses mRNA translation by blocking of translation, less frequently mRNA degradation, while a minor proportion of the miRNAs mediate mRNA target up-regulation [
4]. Depending on their target genes, miRNAs have been shown to be associated with many types of cancers and involved in every aspect of cancer including proliferation, differation, metastasis and chemosensitivity [
5]. Among these miRNAs, miR-34a has been described as a “star” miRNAs in cancer research, which commonly functions as a tumor suppressor and is down-regulated in many human cancers [
6]. Furthermore, the aberrant miR-34a expression has been linked to chemotherapy resistance in a variety of cancer [
7‐
11]. One relevant explanation for this is its regulatory function in p53 signaling pathway. miR-34a is the most significantly inducted miRNAs by p53 and ectopic miR-34a expression induces apoptosis, cell-cycle arrest, senescence and alters cancer cell chemosensitivity through direct targeting multiple genes in p53 signaling pathway, such as Sirt-1, CDK6, E2F3 and Bcl-2 [
12‐
14]. However, this mechanism seems not fitting well in cisplatin-based bladder cancer chemotherapy as miR-34a chemosensitizes bladder cancer cells to cisplatin treatment regardless of p53-Rb pathway status [
9]. So the regulatory mechanism of miR-34a in cisplatin-based bladder cancer chemotherapy is not clear and needs further investigation.
Discussion
Bladder cancer is caused by a series of genetic alterations [
15]. Recently, some miRNA expression profiling study pointed out that the aberrant expression of some miRNA had strong relationship with bladder cancer progression [
16‐
19]. miR-34a was one of such miRNAs, which had been extensively studied in bladder cancer and many other cancers [
8,
10,
20‐
24]. However, there was still a limit in studies focusing on miR-34a in MIBC. In this study, we determined that miR-34a expression was frequently decreased in MIBC cell lines and tumor tissues, which was similar in other cancers. Then, the possible mechanism that may help to explain the decrease of miR-34a in MIBC was investigated. Vogt et, al indicated that promoter hypermethylation could be an important reason for the decreased miR-34a expression in urothelial cancer [
24], in our study, using a more exact method, Massaraay, which could detected up to 500 bp nucleotides containing 14 CpGs, combined with the data of 5-aza-dC demethylation treatment, we clearly demonstrated that promoter hypermethylation caused the decrease of miR-34a expression.
The chemosensitivity of MIBC cells was another area of our concern. Our present results indicated that there was a strong association between cisplatin treatment and miR-34a expression in MIBC. Moreover, we found the epigenetic alteration of miR-34a promoter following cisplatin treatment. It had been confirmed that cisplatin treatment upregulated miR-34a expression regardless of p53 status [
9], while our results also indicated there was no significant correlation between miR-34a and P53 expression following cisplatin treatment (Figure
2A and Additional file
1), so the cisplatin induced epigenetic alteration could be a reasonable explanation for the upregulation of miR-34a expression. Subsequently, increased miR-34a expression induced by cisplatin could in turn improve cisplatin sensitivity of MIBC cells
in vitro and
in vivo. miR-34a has been described a tumor suppressive miRNA in many kinds of cancers through inducing tumor cell apoptosis, senescence, cell cycle arrest or repressing metastasis [
9,
10,
14,
20‐
22,
25]. Our data presented here demonstrated that increased miR-34a expression could efficiently decrease tumorigenity of MIBC cells. This could partly explain its improved effect on chemosensitivity.
A miRNA’s function always relies on its targets. To investigate the primary target of miR-34a that could be the potential mechanism underlying the association between the increased miR-34a expression and cisplatin chemosensitivity, we initially measured the expression of some well-known targets of miR-34a in 5637, T24 and HT-1376 cells following cisplatin treatment, including MYC, BCL2, NOTCH1, CDK6, SIRT1, E2F1, CDK4, HGF, NOTCH2, SOX2 and CD44 [
7,
12,
22,
23,
26,
27]. Surprisingly, in spite of a glimpse through qRT-PCR on the level of mRNA, we still observed a clear inverse correlation between miR-34a and CD44 expression, but not others. Further experiments validated that the tumor-suppressive and chemosensitivity effect of miR-34a was mediated by reducing the production of CD44. As we know, CD44 have been described as a marker of human bladder cancer stem cells (CSCs), which have been reported to be resistant to therapeutics [
28‐
30]. Many studies used chemotherapeutic treatment to enrich cancer stem cells. For example, the CD44
+CD24
lo/2 breast CSCs are enriched in breast cancer patients who have received adjuvant chemotherapy [
31] and more resistant to some chemotherapeutic drugs [
32]. In mouse models of mammary tumors, CSCs have also been shown to be refractory to cisplatin treatment [
33]. Furthermore, chemoresistant colon cancer cells display CSC phenotypes [
34] and CD133
+ hepatic CSCs are chemoresistant due to preferential activation of the Akt pathway [
35]. So here comes confusion. Base on speculations above, after cisplatin treatment, the bladder CSCs should be enriched and the CD44 expression and tumorigenity of the drug resistant cells should be increased, which is opposite of our observations. We noticed that similar results in prostate cancer cells were also reported [
36]. These findings suggested that not all chemotherapeutic treatment is suitable to enrich cancer stem cells.
Methods
Patients and samples
In this study, 15 paired MIBC and adjacent normal tissue specimens were collected from patients who were diagnosed histopathologically with MIBC and received radical cystectomy between September 2010 and December 2011 in Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. All the samples were immediately snap frozen and stored in liquid nitrogen. To obtain homogeneous and histological well-characterized samples for RNA analyses, the nature of the tissue and its specified composition were determined by an experienced pathologist. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board and Ethics Committee of Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and written informed consent was obtained from all patients.
Cell lines and culture
MIBC cell lines 5637, T24, J82 and HT1376 were purchased from ATCC, 5637 and T24 were maintained in RPMI-1640 medium; J82 was maintained in DMEM medium; HT1376 was maintained in MEM medium; SV-HUC-1 was also purchased from ATCC and maintained in DMEM/F-12 medium. Cells were cultured supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS) in a humidified atmosphere of 5% CO2 maintained at 37°C.
Reagents and transfection
Six synthetic, chemically modified short single or double stranded RNA oligonucleotides (miR-34a mimics, mimics NC, miR-34a inhibitor, inhibitor NC, agomir-miR-34a and agomir-NC) were purchased from Ribo Biotech (Guangzhou, China). Agomir-miRNA is a chemically modified miRNA mimics conjugated with cholesterol. Prevalidated siRNA specific for CD44 and a nonsilencing siRNA control were purchased from Genepharma Biotech (Shanghai, China). Lenti-miR-34a and Lenti-NC were purchased from Genechem Biotech (Shanghai, China) Primary antibody CD44 (1:1000) and GAPDH (1:10000) were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO. Oligonucleotide and plasmid transfection was done by using X-tremeGENE siRNA Transfection Reagent (Roche) and FuGene HD Transfection Reagent (Roche) respectively, according to the manufacture’s protocol. The lentivirus infection was carried out according to the manufacture’s protocol and he MOI for 5637, T24 and HT1376 cells was 10, 10 and 5 respectively.
DNA extraction and methylation analysis
Genomic DNA was isolated using QIAamp DNA Mini Kit (Qiagen, Valencia, CA) and bisulfite modification of the genomic DNA was carried out using an Epitect Bisulfite Kit (Qiagen, Valencia, CA) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Quantitative methylation analysis of the promoter of miR-34a was performed using the Sequenom MassARRAY platform (CapitalBio, Beijing, China) as previous study description [
37]. The sequence and primer sets used were shown in Additional file
2. The spectra methylation ratios were generated by Epityper software version 1.0 (Sequenom, San Diego, CA).
Animal experiment
Tumorigenicity in nude mice was determined as described previously [
23,
38]. To evaluate the chemosensitivity effect of miR-34a, four groups of 6 mice each were injected subcutaneously with T24 cells at a single site. 17 days after injection when appreciable tumor formed subcutaneously, agomir-miR-34a or agomir-NC were injected combined with cisplatin or PBS in tumor. To evaluate the tumorigenity of miR-34a, two groups of 8 mice each were injected subcutaneously with miR-34a/NC stably expressing T24 cells constructed by lentivector infection and puromycin screening. Tumor onset measured with calipers at the site of injection every three day by two trained laboratory staffs at different times on the same day 14 weeks after injection when appreciable tumor formed subcutaneously. Tumor volume was calculated using the formula, V = 0.5ab
2, where a represent the larger and b represents the smaller of the 2 perpendicular indexes. Animals were sacrificed 33 days or 38 days after injection and these tumors were weighed. Nude mice were manipulated and cared for in the Experiment Animal Center of the Tongji Medical College and was approved by the Ethics Committee of Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Wuhan, Hubei, Province, P.R. China).
Statistical analysis
At least three independent experiments were completed for each analysis described in this article. Data are shown as mean ± standard deviation (SD). Paired analysis was performed by Student’s t-test, and multiple group comparison was performed by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) using SPSS 19.0 software. P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Additional methods are listed in Additional file
3: Supplementary Materials and Methods.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31072238, 31172441, 81170650) and National Major Scientific and Technological Special Project for Significant New Drugs Development (2012ZX09303018). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests
The authors have declared no conflicts of interest.
Authors’ contributions
HL carried out the epigenetic studies and drafted the manuscript. GY carried out the cell biology studies and participated in the animal experiments. HBX and RLS carried out the immunoassays and participated in the cell biology studies. DX and WG carried out all the qPCR assays. XLG participated in the animal experiments. BL and XGC performed the statistical analysis. ZQY acquised of funding and critically revised the manuscript for important intellectual content. W.X participated in its design and coordination and helped to draft the manuscript. HX conceived of the study, participated in its design and acquised of funding. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.