Further results demonstrated that CK18 stable knockdown using shRNA increased BCRP expression and induced the EMT process in human breast cancer MCF‑7 cells.
Taken together, the present study demonstrated that CK18 might be served as a novel biomarker to predict clinicopathological features and the outcome of breast cancer.
Therefore, our findings suggest that loss of KT18 expression might be a good indicator of the poor prognosis of the breast cancer and it may play an active role in the breast tumorigenesis.
To confirm these observations, we transfected the human K18 gene into the human breast cancer cell line MDA-MB-231 and isolated a stable overexpressing clone.