Mingzhen Li¹, Jialin Qian², Yuanyuan Ma³

¹Department of ThoracicSurgery II, Peking University Cancer Hospital,²Beijing Center forPhysical and Chemical Analysis, ³Department of Thoracic Surgery II, Peking University Cancer Hospital &Institute

Objective:Lung cancer is the leading cause ofcancer-related deaths worldwide with 85% of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)and squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) and adenocarcinoma (AD) are two majorpathological subtypes for NSCLC. However, recently targeted therapies havesignificantly benefited patients with AD. Investigation of specific biology forlung SCC is remanded for the development of effectively targeted therapeutics. Method:RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) was used to compare the transcriptomes of fivepair SCC and normal lung tissues and to investigate gene expression profiling.Bioinformatics was performed to analyze the RNA-Seq data. Quantitative PCR wasdone to evaluate the different gene expression in NSCLC cell lines and clinicalsamples. Result: Among the genes profiling, 329 were upregulated and 205were downregulated in tumor tissues and normal tissues (based on p-value<0.05,log2 (foldchange) ≥2-fold, P>0.001).The top ten increased genes are including GAGE12J, SPRR3, PRAME, SPRR1A,SPRR2E, MAGEA3, SPRR1B, IL36G and TMPRSS11D. Therefore, we identified SPRRfamily in NSCLC cell lines PC9, A549 and H1299. Higher expression of SPRRfamily was in H1299 cells which metastasized to lymph node compared to the A549and PC9 of primary tumor cells. We further detected SPRR genes expression inspecimens. Consistently, higher expression of these genes was observed in tumortissues than normal tissues. Further bioinformatic analysis of these expressionprofile data demonstrated that the signal pathways related to epitheliumdevelopment, cell adhesion, cell cycle and drug resistance was associated withlung cancer. Conclusion: SPRR family expression was elevated in lungcancer tissues and especially SPRR may be promising candidate genes in lungcancer of SCC. The epithelium development, cell adhesion, cell cycle and drugresistance play an important role in the process of lung cancer development.

Key Words: squamous cellcarcinomas  RNA Seq  SPRR family