Kallikrein-related peptidase 7 is a potential target for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.

Kallikrein-related peptidase 7 is a potential target for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.

Oncotarget. 2018 Feb 27;9(16):12894-12906

Authors: Du JP, Li L, Zheng J, Zhang D, Liu W, Zheng WH, Li XS, Yao RC, Wang F, Liu S, Tan X

Abstract
Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers with very poor prognosis, and the five-year survival rate of the patients is less than 5% after diagnosis. Kallikrein-related peptidases (KLKs) belong to a serine protease family with 15 members that play important roles in cellular physiological behavior and diseases. The high expression level of KLK7 in pancreatic cancer tissues is considered to be a marker for the poor prognosis of this disease. In this work, we set out to investigate whether KLK7 could be a target for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. Short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) were designed and constructed in lentivirus to knock down KLK7 in pancreatic cancer cell line PANC-1, and the real time cellular analysis (RTCA) was used to evaluate cell proliferation, migration and invasion abilities. Small molecules inhibiting KLK7 were discovered by computer-aided drug screening and used to inhibit PANC-1 cells. Our results confirmed that KLK7 is significantly up-regulated in pancreatic cancer tissue, and knocking down or inhibiting KLK7 efficiently inhibited the proliferation, migration and invasion of pancreatic cancer cells. This study suggested that KLK7 could be a potential chemotherapy target for treatment of pancreatic cancer, which would provide us a novel strategy for the treatment of this disease.

PMID: 29560118 [PubMed]

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