IFI44L is a novel tumor suppressor in human hepatocellular carcinoma affecting cancer stemness, metastasis, and drug resistance via regulating met/Src signaling pathway

BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. The disease recurrent rate is relatively high resulted in poor 5-year survival in advanced HCC. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) have been considered to be one of the main mechanisms for chemoresistance, metastasis, and recurrent disease. Interferon-induced protein 44-like (IFI44L) gene is a type I interferon-stimulated gene (ISG) and belongs to the IFI44 family. Previous reports indicated antiviral activity against HCV in IFI44L, however, its precise role and function in HCC has not been unveiled. METHODS: To explore the characteristics of hepatic CSCs, we successfully enriched hepatic cancer stem-like cells from three established liver cancer cell lines (Hep3B, HepG2, and PLC lines). Parental Hep3B and HepG2 cells and their sphere cells were treated with doxorubicin for 48 h and cell viability was measured by MTT assay. HCC tissue blocks from 217 patients were sampled for tissue microarray (TMA). Follow-up information and histopathological and clinical data including age, gender, tumor grade, advanced stages, HBV, HCV, tumor number, tumor size, relapse-free survival, and overall survival were obtained from the cancer registry and medical charts. The liver TMA was evaluated for IFI44L expression using immunohistochemical staining and scores. RESULTS: These hepatic cancer stem-like cells possess important cancer stemness characteristics including sphere-forming abilities, expressing important HCC cancer stem cell markers, and more chemoresistant. Interestingly, we found that overexpression of IFI44L decreased chemoresistance towards doxorubicin and knockdown of IFI44L restored chemoresistance as well as promoted sphere formation. Furthermore, we found that depletion of IFI44L enhanced migration, invasion, and pulmonary metastasis through activating Met/Src signaling pathway. Clinically, the expression level of IFI44L significantly reduced in HCC tumor tissues. Low expression of IFI44L levels also correlated with larger tumor size, disease relapse, advanced stages, and poor clinical survival in HCC patients. CONCLUSION: Taken together, we first demonstrated that IFI44L is a novel tumor suppressor to affect cancer stemness, metastasis, and drug resistance via regulating Met/Src signaling pathway in HCC and can be serve as an important prognostic marker. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12885-018-4529-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.