Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 8|pp 6586—6599

The expression of PDGF-BB predicts curative effect in locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma treated by radiotherapy

Puchun Er¹, Dong Qian², Wencheng Zhang¹, Baozhong Zhang¹, Hui Wei¹, Tian Zhang¹, Xi Chen¹, Yuwen Wang¹, Jingjing Zhao¹, Qi Wang¹, Qingsong Pang¹, Ping Wang¹

¹Department of radiotherapy, Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, National Clinical Research Center for Cancer, Key Laboratory of Cancer Prevention and Therapy, Tianjin, Tianjin’s Clinical Research Center for Cancer, Tianjin, China
²Department of Radiotherapy, The First Affiliated Hospital of University of Science and Technology of China. Hefei, China

* Equal contribution

Received: October 29, 2019Accepted: February 4, 2020Published: April 24, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102993

Copyright © 2020 Er et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Radiotherapy is the major approach and is well tolerated in locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). And nowadays, no effective biological markers have been identified for predicting the prognosis of patients with ESCC. Platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) is associated with a poor prognosis of various malignancies. The present study aimed to assess the effect of PDGF-BB on radiotherapeutic responses of ESCC and the underlying mechanisms of its roles in ESCC. Serum from 68 cases that received neoadjuvant or radical radiotherapy was obtained before and during radiotherapy. Gene expression analyses were validated by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay. The prognosis of patients with significantly reduced PDGF-BB was probably better than that of the others found in the progression-free survival and overall survival groups. Depletion of PDGFB significantly suppressed the proliferation, invasion and migration of cancer cells. Inhibiting PDGFB induced cellular apoptosis and promoted the sensitivity to ionizing radiation (IR). Furthermore, IR inhibited PDGF-BB-induced migration by blocking the PI3K/AKT pathway in ESCC cells. We found that the expression of PDGF-BB provided a possible model for predicting ESCC radiotherapy. It can also be used as a prognostic indicator for locally advanced ESCC that was treated by radiotherapy.