Elevated Bmi1 is associated with cervical node metastasis, Ki-67 abundance and reduced overall survival, and also serves as an independent prognostic factor for patient outcomes.
The high expression of BMI-1 in cervical cancer is related to tumor progression, lymph node metastasis and HPV infection, suggesting that cervical cancer with excessive BMI-1 expression possesses high metastases potential and that BMI-1 may be a promising biomarker for predicting metastasis in cervical cancer.
In addition, miR-200c overexpression significantly inhibited melanoma xenograft growth and metastasis in vivo, and this correlated with diminished expression of BMI-1 and reduced levels of E-cadherin in these tumors.
These findings demonstrate the novel mechanism for BMI-1 in contributing to EC cell invasion and that repression of BMI-1 by miR-194 could have a therapeutic potential to suppress EC metastasis.
Moreover, immunohistochemical staining revealed Bmi-1 was overexpressed in 63.2% UCC tissues (Bmi-1 ++ or +++), and the overexpression of Bmi-1 protein was significantly correlated with tumor size (P = 0.046), clinical stage (P = 0.021), and regional lymph nodes metastasis (P = 0.010).
For the first time, we provide images of human prostate carcinoma metastasis precursor cells isolated from blood and shown to overexpress both BMI1 and Ezh2 oncoproteins.