Background
Lung cancer is one of the most frequently occurring malignancies, and the leading cause of cancer-related death in men and the second leading cause in women [
1]. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for approximately 85% of all lung cancer cases, with adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and large cell carcinoma as the main histological subtypes. Surgical resection or radiotherapy have curative potential, and in Norway the 5-year survival among patients with early stage disease who undergo complete surgical resection is approximately 65% [
2]. Even for stage I patients there is a significant risk of relapse, and NSCLC carries one of the most dismal outcomes for stage I disease among all tumor types [
3]. Clearly, there is an urgent need for more effective treatment as well as improved classification algorithms to identify patients at increased risk of relapse.
NSCLC patients who undergo curatively intended surgery are stratified according to TNM (tumor-node-metastasis) staging, and based on this patients are selected for adjuvant therapy. However, tumors within the same disease stage are biologically heterogeneous and behave differently, and identification of biomarkers could enable further subclassification of patients and thereby a more accurate prediction of prognosis. Furthermore, the increased use of targeted therapies in NSCLC requires improved knowledge about molecular alterations in the tumor cells to facilitate therapeutic decisions.
One potentially interesting molecular marker is S100A4, a member of the S100 family of calcium binding proteins. S100A4 is localized in the cytoplasm, nucleus and extracellular space and has multiple biological functions including regulation of angiogenesis and stimulation of motility and invasion. S100A4 promotes metastasis in several experimental animal models and is associated with patient outcome in a variety of cancer types [
4]. In lung cancer, experimental models have shown that there is an association between S100A4 expression and motile and invasive abilities, and that suppression of S100A4 results in reduced metastatic potential [
5,
6].
Several studies have investigated S100A4 protein expression in NSCLC, with the percentage of positive cases ranging from 20-84% [
7‐
11]. In general, S100A4 is not expressed in normal lung epithelium [
7], whereas a variety of cells in the tumor microenvironment are S100A4-positive, including lymphocytes, fibroblasts and smooth muscle cells [
9,
10]. In some examinations, S100A4 expression has been shown to be associated with pT stage and poor patient outcome [
9], while other studies have failed to demonstrate a prognostic role for S100A4 in NSCLC [
7,
8].
Ephrin-A1 (Eph receptor interacting protein-A1) is a cell surface protein which can act as a ligand for several of the Eph receptor tyrosine kinases, such as EphA2, EphA3 and EphA4 [
12]. Ephrin-A1 is involved in multiple biological processes, including tumor angiogenesis [
13,
14], cell motility [
15] and metastasis [
16,
17]. To our knowledge, the role of ephrin-A1 in lung cancer has not been investigated, and based on its pro-metastatic functions in other types of cancer, characterization of the expression in NSCLC would be of substantial interest.
Osteopontin, a member of the small integrin-binding ligand N-linked glycoprotein (SIBLING) family, is a secreted chemokine-like multifunctional protein. Biological processes regulated by osteopontin include adhesion, migration, invasion, proteolysis, enhanced cell survival and angiogenesis [
18,
19], and several studies have shown an association between high osteopontin expression and poor patient outcome in NSCLC [
20‐
22].
Our group has previously shown that extracellular S100A4 induces the expression of ephrin-A1 and osteopontin in osteosarcoma cell lines [
18,
23]. Based on the reported biological effects of ephrin-A1 and osteopontin, S100A4-induced expression of these molecules may be one of several mechanisms by which S100A4 promotes tumor progression. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether S100A4 induces expression of ephrin-A1 and osteopontin in NSCLC, and to characterize the expression of these molecular markers in primary tumor tissue from prospectively recruited patients undergoing curative surgery for NSCLC. Furthermore, associations between expression of these proteins and clinical and histopathological parameters were investigated.
Methods
Cell culture and treatment
The human lung adenocarcinoma cell line EKVX was established at Department of Tumor Biology, The Norwegian Radium Hospital, Oslo University Hospital. The adenocarcinoma cell line A549 and the squamous cell carcinoma cell lines HTB-182 (NCI-H520) and SW900 (HTB-59), were purchased from the American Type Culture Collection (Rockville, MD, USA). Recombinant human S100A4 protein was produced as described previously [
18]. Cells were cultivated in RPMI 1640 (Lonza, Verviers, Belgium), supplemented with 8.5% fetal bovine serum (PAA Laboratories, Pasching, Austria), 20 mM Hepes buffer (Lonza) and 2 mM GlutaMAX (Gibco, Invitrogen, Oslo, Norway). All cell cultures were routinely tested for Mycoplasma infection. The identity of the cell lines were determined by STR profiling using Powerplex 16 (Promega, Madison, WI, USA). For cell culture experiments, subconfluent cell cultures were detached with Versene EDTA (Lonza), and 1 × 10
6 cells were seeded in T25 flasks and grown overnight. The following day, the culture medium was replaced with medium with or without recombinant human S100A4 protein (2 μg/ml or 10 μg/ml) and further incubated for 6 or 24 hours. Cells were harvested by Tri-reagent (Ambion, Applied Biosystems Europe, Oslo, Norway) for RNA isolation, and by scraping for preparation of cell lysates.
Real time RT-PCR
One microgram total RNA was reverse transcribed using the iScript RT kit (Bio-Rad, Hercules, CA, USA). Gene expression levels were examined by quantitative real-time reverse transcription PCR (qPCR) as described in Boye
et al.[
23] for ephrin-A1 and Berge
et al.[
18] for osteopontin. The PCR threshold cycle number (Ct) was used to calculate the relative expression of each gene normalized to the expression of an endogenous control gene as follows: 2
−ΔCt, where ΔCt = Ct
gene – Ct
control gene.
Western blot analysis
Western blotting was performed as described previously [
18]. Antibody against ephrin-A1 was obtained from Santa Cruz Biotechnology (sc-911, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Santa Cruz, CA, USA).
Patient cohort
Primary tumor samples were prospectively collected from 244 patients with assumed or verified NSCLC who were considered operable and underwent curatively intended surgical resection at Rikshospitalet, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway between March 2006 and April 2010. Following surgery, resected tissue was processed for routine histopathological examination. The study was approved by the Regional Ethics Committee (S-06402b), and all patients were informed and signed a written consent. Twenty-seven patients were excluded from the study for the following reasons: histology other than NSCLC (carcinoid (12), small cell lung cancer (4), lung metastases from other primary cancer (7)) and withdrawal of consent (4). The study population thus included 217 patients with histologically verified primary NSCLC. Histological examination of all tissue specimens was performed by experienced pathologists, and the histopathological parameters were retrieved from the pathology reports. The tumors were staged according to the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), TNM 7. The histological subtypes were classified according to WHO criteria, with adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and large cell carcinoma as the three main types. Bronchioalveolar carcinomas were included in the adenocarcinoma group, constituting 4.5% of these tumors. Seven patients received neoadjuvant chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy due to the following reasons: pancoast tumor, N2 disease and for downstaging of a primarily inoperable tumor. The patients´ tobacco use was registered and divided into three groups; current smoker, former smoker or never smoker. Never smoker was defined as never having smoked on a regular basis, and former smoker was defined as having quit smoking at least one year before inclusion in the study.
Tissue microarray (TMA) construction
TMA sections were constructed using a tissue arrayer instrument (Beecher Instruments, Silver Springs, MD, USA). Formalin-fixed tumor tissue from 206 patients was available for TMA construction. The most representative tumor areas in each donor block were selected by an experienced pathologist and marked on hematoxylin-eosin stained sections. From corresponding blocks, one mm core biopsies were obtained from at least two different tumor-rich areas, and two additional cores were selected from adjacent normal lung tissue. The cores were inserted directly into the recipient paraffin block in a grid arrangement, and one slide from each prepared TMA block was stained with hematoxylin-eosin for tumor tissue confirmation.
Immunohistochemistry
The TMA sections were immunostained for S100A4 and osteopontin using the EnVision
TM FLEX + detection system from Dako (Dako, Glostrup, Denmark). Dako PT link was used for deparaffinization and heat-induced epitope retrieval. Sections were preheated in Dako EnVision FLEX + Target Retrieval Solution, High pH and rinsed in Dako wash buffer according to the manufacturer´s instructions. Thereafter, endogenous peroxidase activity was blocked for 5 minutes using 0.03% H
2O
2, sections were washed twice in Dako wash buffer and incubated for 30 minutes with primary antibody at room temperature. After an additional washing step, slides were incubated with secondary antibody (HRP-labelled polymer conjugated to anti-mouse or anti-rabbit immunoglobulins) for 30 minutes at room temperature. After new washing, sections were incubated for 10 minutes in DAB (diaminobenzidine). Finally the sections were rinsed twice in water before counterstaining with hematoxylin and mounting in Diatex. The following primary antibodies were used: mouse monoclonal anti-S100A4 (20.1) [
24] diluted 1:300 and rabbit polyclonal anti-osteopontin diluted 1:300 (Rb-9097, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Fremont, CA, USA). Ephrin-A1 immunostaining was done using the EnVision + system from Dako (Dako) as follows: TMA slides were deparaffinized with xylene, rehydrated through graded ethanol solutions and rinsed in distilled water. For antigen retrieval, tissue sections were preheated in a microwave oven at 100 ° C for 15 minutes in Tris/EDTA solution, left in the buffer for 10 minutes after boiling, rinsed in distilled water and in Dako wash buffer. The rest of the procedure was performed as described for S100A4 and osteopontin. The primary antibody used was rabbit polyclonal anti-ephrin-A1 diluted 1:300 (sc-911, Santa Cruz Biotechnology). Sections from colorectal tumor tissue, ovarian tissue and cervical portio biopsy tissue known to express high amounts of S100A4, osteopontin and ephrin-A1, respectively, were used as positive controls.
Evaluation of immunohistochemistry
All immunostained sections were evaluated by two investigators (A.K.R and K.B for S100A4, and A.K.R and M.L-I for ephrin-A1 and osteopontin), and discrepancies were resolved by consensus. Immunohistochemical expression was evaluated without knowledge on the corresponding clinicopathological parameters. In nine cases staining was not evaluable due to lack of representative tumor material. S100A4 immunoreactivity was apparent as both cytoplasmic and nuclear staining, and these were recorded as individual variables (S100A4c and S100A4n, respectively). The samples were scored using a 0–3 scale according to staining intensity, with 0 denoting negative (no staining), 1 denoting weak staining, 2 intermediate staining and 3 strong staining. For nuclear staining, the fraction of positively stained nuclei were estimated (0 = 0%, 1 = < 1%, 2 = 1 – 10%, 3 = 11 – 33%, 4 = 34 – 66% and 5 = 67 – 100%). All samples with >10% stained nuclei (score ≥ 3) were considered positive, and grouped according to staining intensity (implying that a sample with 50% stained nuclei and intensity score 2 would be given 2 as a final score). Osteopontin and ephrin-A1 showed less variation in staining intensity than S100A4, and differentiating between weak and intermediate staining was difficult. Consequently, osteopontin and ephrin-A1 immunoreactivity was scored according to a 0–2 scale, with 0 defined as negative (no staining), 1 as intermediate staining and 2 as strong staining. The percentage of positive tumor cells was not evaluated for S100A4c, ephrin-A1 and osteopontin because there was uniform staining of the tumor cells in the vast majority of cases, and thus the estimation of the fraction of stained cells provided no additional information. For all three biomarkers, the dominant staining intensity was scored. Furthermore, at least two cores from different tumor areas of the same specimen were included in the TMA, and the staining intensity was highly similar in the analysed cases.
Statistical analysis
Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS version 16.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Associations between expression of S100A4, ephrin-A1 and osteopontin, and associations between immunohistochemical expression and clinicopathological variables were examined using two-tailed Fisher´s exact test or linear by linear association chi-square test. For the RT-PCR experiments, and to compare the mean tumor size of the S100A4 negative and positive tumors, two-tailed Student´s t-test was used. P values < 0.05 were considered statistically significant.
Discussion
In the present study we have demonstrated that extracellular S100A4 stimulates the expression of ephrin-A1 in NSCLC cell lines. Furthermore, we have characterized the expression of S100A4, ephrin-A1 and osteopontin in primary tumors from 217 NSCLC patients, and investigated the associations between these biomarkers and conventional clinicopathological parameters. Our group has previously shown that extracellular S100A4 induces the expression of ephrin-A1 and osteopontin in osteosarcoma cell lines by activating the transcription factor NF-κB [
18,
23]. Based on these results, we wanted to investigate whether S100A4-mediated induction of ephrin-A1 and osteopontin also occurs in NSCLC cell lines. Interestingly, we observed that S100A4 was able to induce expression of ephrin-A1 both at the mRNA and protein level in adenocarcinoma, but not in squamous cell carcinoma cell lines. However, no S100A4-mediated stimulation of osteopontin expression was found in any of the cell lines tested. Importantly, a significant association was also found between expression of S100A4 and ephrin-A1 in primary tumor samples from NSCLC patients, indicating that S100A4 stimulates ephrin-A1 expression both in vivo and in vitro.
We found high expression of ephrin-A1 in 13% and intermediate expression in 72% of the tumors, and the fact that ephrin-A1 is expressed in the majority of the samples may suggest that this protein plays an important biological role in NSCLC. However, ephrin-A1 was not associated with any of the clinicopathological parameters apart from histological type. Interestingly, we found that adenocarcinomas had a higher percentage of S100A4 and ephrin-A1 positivity compared to squamous and large cell tumors, and this finding is in keeping with that of previous studies on S100A4 [
7‐
9] and ephrin-A1 [
25]. The histological subclasses of NSCLC differ not only in their presentation in different regions of the lung and in outcome [
26], but also in molecular characteristics and thereby in response to targeted therapies [
27]. Consequently, the differences in expression patterns of the protein markers between the adenocarcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas in this study are not surprising.
Expression of S100A4 in surgically resected NSCLC specimens has previously been investigated in several studies [
7‐
11], and the percentage of S100A4 positive cases in these studies range from 20-84%. In our study, intermediate or strong cytoplasmic expression of S100A4 was observed in 57% of the cases, which is comparable to the previous investigations. For osteopontin, high expression was found in 77% of the tumors, whereas in previous studies in NSCLC, osteopontin immunoreactivity range from 38–67% [
20,
21,
28‐
30]. In contrast to previous reports, where an association between high expression and squamous cell carcinoma has been described [
28,
30], we did not find any significant associations between osteopontin expression and conventional clinicopathological parameters.
Possible explanations for the contradicting results for both S100A4 and osteopontin could be that different antibodies, different immunohistochemical staining techniques and different scoring systems were used. In the present study we have used immunohistochemical staining of tissue microarrays. A potential disadvantage with the use of TMA is the possibility that small tissue cores do not adequately represent the tumor, especially in cases with intratumoral heterogeneity. To evaluate whether the expression patterns of the protein markers on the small TMA cores were representative for the whole tumor, we immunostained seven whole sections with the same antibodies. The staining intensity of S100A4 and ephrin-A1 was generally homogenous across the sections, indicating that the obtained results are indeed representative of the whole tumor section. For osteopontin, however, some intratumor heterogeneity was observed. Also of importance, the majority of the mentioned studies have been retrospectively conducted, and the patient cohorts may therefore be biased. Our cohort was prospectively recruited, and the distribution of gender and age at surgery corresponds well with data from The Norwegian Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery. Thus, we believe that this patient population can be considered representative for patients with early stage NSCLC undergoing primary surgery in Norway.
S100A4 expression was associated with small tumor size and high degree of differentiation, and when analyzing the adenocarcinomas separately, significant inverse associations between S100A4 expression and lymph node metastasis as well as pTNM stage were found. Given that S100A4 in general is associated with poor prognosis and promotes metastasis in a number of tumor types [
4], this result was rather unexpected. Our results are also in contrast to other investigations in NSCLC where S100A4 expression was associated with high TNM stage and poor outcome [
9‐
11]. Importantly, in our cohort of prospectively recruited patients S100A4 expression was associated with several parameters that each reflects a less aggressive phenotype, suggesting that the observed result could be of clinical relevance, but further studies are required to clarify this issue.
How might we explain the unexpected result that S100A4 is associated with a non-aggressive phenotype in NSCLC? One of the most important biological functions contributing to S100A4-induced metastasis is increased cell migration and invasive capacity. However, induction of S100A4 has also been shown to decrease motility and invasiveness, such as in squamous cell carcinoma [
31], and down-regulation of S100A4 in astrocytes increased their migratory capacity in vitro [
32]. Furthermore, certain lines of evidence suggest that S100A4 may have tumor suppressor functions in the lung. S100A4 knockout mice, that were otherwise phenotypically normal, were prone to spontaneous tumor development, and the most frequent tumor observed was carcinoma of the lung [
33]. Taken together, these results indicate that the biological function of S100A4 is cell type-dependent, and possibly, S100A4 may not play a pro-metastatic role in all tumor types. One might also speculate that S100A4 could inhibit tumor progression in the early stages of NSCLC development, while promoting metastasis at later disease stages, similar to the cytokine transforming growth factor β [
34].
Moreover, our findings suggest that S100A4-induced expression of ephrin-A1 may be one mechanism by which S100A4 mediates its biological functions. If so, one should assume that similar functions are attributed to both proteins, and interestingly ephrin-A1 stimulates both cellular motility [
15], angiogenesis [
13,
14] and metastasis [
35], features that are also associated with S100A4 [
4]. However, seemingly contradictory results have been reported for ephrin-A1, and overexpression of ephrin-A1 or treatment with ephrin-A1-Fc (soluble recombinant ephrin-A1 fused to the Fc portion of IgG) has been shown to inhibit invasiveness and reduce tumor growth in bladder, pancreatic and gastric cancer, and in malignant mesothelioma [
36‐
40]. In addition, ephrin-A1-Fc was found to inhibit tumor growth and migration in NSCLC cells [
41]
. Ephrin-A1 is supposed to act as a tumor suppressor through its preferred receptor EphA2 [
25] which is overexpressed in NSCLC [
41]
. Similar to its ligand, the role of EphA2 in cancer is somewhat conflicting. Increased expression is associated with poor clinical outcome in several tumor types, including NSCLC [
3,
25,
42,
43]. However, EphA2 can also act as a tumor suppressor [
43], and recently, high expression of both EphA2 and ephrin-A1 was found to be related to favorable prognostic factors in stage I NSCLC patients [
25]. Based on our findings that S100A4 is associated with small tumor size and a less aggressive phenotype, one might speculate that S100A4-mediated induction of ephrin-A1 could be implicated in reduced tumor growth and invasiveness in NSCLC. However, ephrin-A1 expression was not associated with tumor size, differentiation or tumor stage, indicating that at least these S100A4-associated features are independent of ephrin-A1. Overall, these results suggest that ephrin-A1 plays an important role in tumor progression, but the exact function is complex, cell-type dependent and most likely relies on many factors, including its preferred receptor EphA2 [
44]. Furthermore, the role of ephrin-A1 as a biomarker still remains elusive, and especially in NSCLC further studies are certainly required.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Authors’ contributions
AKR conceived the study, carried out the cell culture experiments, evaluated immunostained sections, performed data analysis and wrote the manuscript. ML-I evaluated immunostained sections. GB performed real time RT-PCR analyses and Western blotting. OTB and SKS provided patient material and patient data. GMM conceived the study and participated in writing the manuscript. KB conceived the study, evaluated immunostained sections, participated in data analysis and manuscript drafting. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.