Genetic or pharmacological inhibition of ANO1 suppresses proliferation, induces apoptosis, and reduces migration in epithelium-originated cancer cells.
// Lizhao Guan 1 , Yan Song 1 , Jian Gao 1 , Jianjun Gao 2 , KeWei Wang 1, 2 1 Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology, State Key Laboratory of Natural and Biomimetic Drugs, Peking University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Beijing 100191, China 2 Department of Pharmacology, Qingdao University School of Pharmacy, Qingdao 266021, China Correspondence to: KeWei Wang, email: wangkw@bjmu.edu.cn , wangkw@qdu.edu.cn Keywords: ANO1, proliferation, apoptosis, migration, cancer, CaCC inh -A01, T16A inh -A01 Received: March 02, 2016 Accepted: October 01, 2016 Published: October 08, 2016 ABSTRACT ANO1, a calcium-activated chloride channel, has been reported to be amplified or overexpressed in tissues of several cancers. However, reports on its roles in tumor progression obtained from cancer cell lines are inconsistent, suggesting that the role of ANO1 in tumorigenesis is likely dependent on either its expression level or cell-type expressing ANO1. To investigate the biological roles of ANO1 in different tumor cells, we, in this study, selected several cancer cell lines and a normal HaCaT cell line with high expression levels of ANO1, and examined the function of ANO1 in these cells using approaches of lentiviral knockdown and pharmacological inhibition. We found that ANO1 knockdown significantly inhibited cell proliferation and induced cell apoptosis in either tumor cell lines or normal HaCaT cell line. Moreover, silencing ANO1 arrested cancer cells at G1 phase of cell cycle. Treatment with ANO1 inhibitor CaCC inh -A01 reduced cell viability in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, both ANO1 inhibitors CaCC inh -A01 and T16A inh -A01 significantly suppressed cell migration. Our findings show that ANO1 overexpression promotes cancer cell proliferation and migration; and genetic or pharmacological inhibition of ANO1 induces apoptosis and cell cycle arrest at G1 phase in different types of epithelium-originated cancer cells.
Guan et al. (2016) studied this question.