Blockade of SDF-1/CXCR4 signalling inhibits pancreatic cancer progression in vitro via inactivation of canonical Wnt pathway

Extra-pancreatic metastasis is a difficult problem for surgical intervention in pancreatic cancer. CXC chemokine receptor 4 (CXCR4) was considered to have an important role in this process. We hypothesized it may contribute to the pancreatic cancer progression through influencing canonical Wnt pathway. The purpose of this study was to examine the functional role of CXCR4 in the progression of pancreatic cancers and explore the possible mechanism. To this end, the relation between CXCR4 and clinical characteristics was analysed. shRNA against CXCR4 was applied to disrupt the SDF-1/CXCR4 signal transduction pathways in pancreatic cancer cell lines. Our results showed that overall survival in the case of patients positive for CXCR4 expression was significantly lower than that in the case of patients negative for CXCR4 expression. Notably, in vitro studies we observed that the abrogation of CXCR4 could obviously influence the pancreatic cancer cell phenotype including cell proliferation, colony formation, cell invasion and also inhibit the TOPflash activity. In addition, Wnt target genes and mesenchymal markers such as Vimentin and Slug were also inhibited in CXCR4 knockdown cells. Collectively, these data reported here demonstrate CXCR4 could modulate the canonical Wnt pathway and perhaps be a promising therapeutic target for pancreatic cancer progression.