The specific mechanism of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) progression, a pathological type that accounts for the highest proportion of RCC, remains unclear. In this study, bioinformatics analysis of scRNA-seq dataset in ccRCC revealed that MIOX was a gene specifically down-regulated in tumor epithelial cells of ccRCC. Analysis of the TCGA database further validated the association between decreased MIOX mRNA levels and ccRCC malignant phenotype and poor prognosis. Immunohistochemistry indicated the down-regulation of MIOX in ccRCC tissues compared to paired adjacent renal tissues, with further down-regulation of MIOX in the primary tumors of patients with primary metastasis compared to those without metastasis. Also, patients with low expression of MIOX showed shorter metastasis-free survival (MFS) compared to those with high MIOX expression. In vitro results showed that overexpression of MIOX in ccRCC cells inhibited the proliferation, migration and invasion and promoted apoptosis. Mechanistically, up-regulation of MIOX inhibited autophagy to elevate the levels of ROS, and thus suppressed STAT3/c-Myc-mediated epithelial-mesenchymal transition in ccRCC cells. In vivo data further confirmed that increased MIOX expression suppressed the growth and proliferation of RCC cells and reduced the ability of RCC cells to form metastases in the lung. This study demonstrates that MIOX is an important regulatory molecule of ccRCC, which is conducive to understanding the potential molecular mechanism of ccRCC progression.
Keywords: Autophagy; Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC); Epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT); MIOX; Metastasis.
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