Statistical analyses revealed that high levels of SPHK1 expression were associated with tumor size, lymph node metastasis and the Tumor-Node-Metastasis stage.
Finally, immunohistochemical examination revealed that gallbladder cancer with lymph node metastasis had significantly higher expression of phospho-SPHK1 than that without.
Sphingosine kinase 1 is involved in papillary thyroid carcinoma development and progression and can serve as a potential biomarker predictive of lymph node metastasis.
Immunohistochemical analysis of 122 breast cancer cases revealed that the expression levels of SPHK1 were upregulated in 64 tumor tissues (52.5%), and increased expression levels of the protein were significantly associated with the presence of lymph node metastasis (P=0.0016), number of positive lymph nodes (P=0.0268) and presence of distant metastasis (P=0.0097).
S1P/SphK1 may be novel targets for inhibiting lymph node metastasis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, and may provide the basis for a therapeutic strategy to suppress lymph node metastasis.
SphK1 is overexpressed in CRC tissues and cell lines, and upregulation of SphK1 correlated significantly with the following parameters: lymph node metastasis, liver metastasis, and advanced TNM stage.
Our findings show for the first time that human primary breast tumours and associated lymph node metastases exhibit a strong correlation between SK1 and leptin receptor expression (Pearson R = 0.78 and R = 0.77, respectively, P <0.001).
There was a close correlation between the expression of SphK1 and FAK or p-FAK and the co-expression of SphK1, FAK and p-FAK significantly associated with histological grade, Dukes' stage, lymph node metastasis and distant metastasis.
However, treatment with the specific SphK1 inhibitor SK1-I suppressed S1P levels, reduced metastases to lymph nodes and lungs, and decreased overall tumor burden of our murine model.