Novel prognostic marker PRMT1 regulates cell growth via downregulation of CDKN1A in HCC

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a major type of liver cancer caused by the hepatitis B and C viruses, alcohol and exposure to aflatoxin. For HCC treatment, anticancer drugs have been widely used, but drug resistance in advanced HCC is an important problem, resulting in a continuous need for novel therapeutic targets. Therefore, in this study, we established a screening pipeline based on RNA-seq to screen novel therapeutic/prognostic targets in HCC and identified PRMT1 (Protein Arginine Methyltransferase 1). In the prognostic analysis, the overexpression of PRMT1 was clearly associated with poor prognosis in a number of HCC patient cohorts. Moreover, after PRMT1 knockdown, HCC cell lines exhibited cell growth and spheroid formation suppression, an increase in Sub-G1 cells by FACS analysis, and enrichment of the cell cycle pathway via functional enrichment analysis. With these results, we demonstrated that PRMT1 could be a novel prognostic marker and therapeutic target for HCC therapy.