Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Oral & Craniofacial Sciences and Oral Cancer Research & Coordinating Centre, Faculty of Dentistry, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Anatomical and Cellular Pathology, State Key Laboratory in Oncology in South China and Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
  • 3 Institute of Cancer and Genomic Medicine, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
  • 4 School of Biomedical Sciences and Center for Cancer Research, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
J Pathol, 2017 05;242(1):62-72.
PMID: 28240350 DOI: 10.1002/path.4879

Abstract

Undifferentiated nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a cancer with high metastatic potential that is consistently associated with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection. In this study, we have investigated the functional contribution of sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) signalling to the pathogenesis of NPC. We show that EBV infection or ectopic expression of the EBV-encoded latent genes (EBNA1, LMP1, and LMP2A) can up-regulate sphingosine kinase 1 (SPHK1), the key enzyme that produces S1P, in NPC cell lines. Exogenous addition of S1P promotes the migration of NPC cells through the activation of AKT; shRNA knockdown of SPHK1 resulted in a reduction in the levels of activated AKT and inhibition of cell migration. We also show that S1P receptor 3 (S1PR3) mRNA is overexpressed in EBV-positive NPC patient-derived xenografts and a subset of primary NPC tissues, and that knockdown of S1PR3 suppressed the activation of AKT and the S1P-induced migration of NPC cells. Taken together, our data point to a central role for EBV in mediating the oncogenic effects of S1P in NPC and identify S1P signalling as a potential therapeutic target in this disease. Copyright © 2017 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.