Vasorin is a potential serum biomarker and drug target of hepatocarcinoma screened by subtractive-EMSA-SELEX to clinic patient serum

// Shaohua Li 1,* , Hui Li 1,* , Xiqin Yang 1,* , Wei Wang 1 , Aixue Huang 1 , Jie Li 1 , Xingliang Qin 1 , Fei Li 2 , Guanyi Lu 2 , Hongmei Ding 1 , Xueting Su 1 , Lvbin Hou 1 , Wei Xia 1 , Ming Shi 1 , Hongwen Zhang 3 , Qiang Zhao 1 , Jie Dong 1 , Xingfeng Ge 1 , Leqiao Sun 1 , Chenjun Bai 1 , Chaonan Wang 1 , Xuelian Shen 1 , Tao Fang 1 , Fusheng Wang 4 , Heqiu Zhang 1 and Ningsheng Shao 1 1 Beijing Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Beijing, China 2 Beijing Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Beijing, China 3 Department of Interventional Radiology, General Hospital of Fuzhou, Fuzhou, China 4 Center of Infectous Disease, Beijing 302 Hospital, Beijing, China * These authors contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Ningsheng Shao, email: // Heqiu Zhang, email: // Keywords : vasorin, biomarker, hepatocarcinoma, subtractive-EMSA-SELEX, serum Received : December 23, 2014 Accepted : February 13, 2015 Published : March 12, 2015 Abstract We report a new biomarker of hepatocarcinoma, vasorin (VASN), screened by a subtractive EMSA-SELEX strategy from AFP negative serum of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients with extrahepatic metastases. VASN was verified to be highly expressed in sera of 100 cases of HCC patients compared with 97 cases of normal persons and 129 cases of hepatitis patients. Further validation by Q-PCR,IFA and Western blot showed higher expression of VASN at mRNA and protein levels in HCC cell lines and HCC tissues than in normal controls. RNA interference and forced overexpression assays verified that VASN promotes cell proliferation and migration and inhibits apoptosis. Down-regulation of microRNA miR145 and miR146a is an important mechanism leading to high expression of VASN. Conclusion: As a membrane protein and/or as free protein, VASN may be an effective target for biological treatment of liver cancer and is a potential biomarker for HCC diagnosis. Small molecular nucleotides targeting VASN are promising biological therapies to HCC.