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Preclinical study reveals that STAP-2 inhibits epithelial-mesenchymal transition and cancer cell motility by disrupting SMAD complexes, suggesting a novel therapeutic target for cancer metastasis.
Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is crucial for initiation of cancer metastasis. EMT-induced epithelial cancer cells gain stemness characteristics, which enhance cancer malignancy and chemoresistance. Therefore, it is important to clarify the function of EMT-related genes for development of therapeutics for cancer metastasis. Here, we showed that Signal-transducing adaptor protein-2 (STAP-2) inhibits EMT in cancer cells through repressing SMAD-mediated ZEB1 expression, which is a master transcription factor of EMT. STAP-2 inhibits the interaction between SMAD3 and SMAD4, resulting in the downregulation of SMAD2/3/4 complex formation and TGF-β signal-induced gene expression. STAP-2 expression was repressed by SMAD2/3-mediated TGF-β signals and activated by OVOL1, which is one of the EMT repressor transcription factors. Our study showed that STAP-2 is a novel EMT repressor gene which represses ZEB1 expression and motility of cancer cells.
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Okuyama et al. (2026) studied this question.
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