Purpose: Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a highly heterogeneous and aggressive breast malignancy. Glucocorticoid (GC)-glucocorticoid receptor (GR) pathway plays a pivotal role in the cellular responses to various stresses including chemotherapy. Serum- and glucocorticoid-induced kinase-1 (SGK1) is known as an important downstream effector molecule in the GR signaling pathway, we attempted to explore its clinicopathological and functional significance in TNBC in which GR is expressed.
Methods: We first immunolocalized GR and SGK1 and correlated the results with clinicopathological variables and clinical outcome in 131 TNBC patients. We also evaluated the effects of SGK1 on the cell proliferation and migration in TNBC cell lines with administration of dexamethasone (DEX) to further clarify the significance of SGK1.
Results: The status of SGK1 in carcinoma cells was significantly associated with adverse clinical outcome in TNBC patients examined and was significantly associated with lymph node metastasis, pathological stage, and lymphatic invasion of the patients. In particular, SGK1 immunoreactivity was significantly associated with an increased risk of recurrence in GR-positive TNBC patients. Subsequent in vitro studies also demonstrated that DEX promoted TNBC cell migration and the silencing of gene expression did inhibit the cell proliferation and migration of TNBC cells under DEX treatment.
Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore an association between SGK1 and clinicopathological variables and clinical outcome of TNBC patients. SGK1 status was significantly positively correlated with adverse clinical outcome of TNBC patients and promoted carcinoma cell proliferation and migration of carcinoma cells.
Keywords: Dexamethasone; Glucocorticoid receptor; SGK1; Triple-negative breast cancer.
© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.