Centrosome Protein 78 Is Overexpressed in Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer and Is Associated with Tumor Molecular Subtypes and Mutation Signatures

BACKGROUND: Centrosome aberrations have long been linked to tumorigenesis. Centrosome protein 78 (CEP78) is a centrosome component that is required to regulate the cell cycle, but its role in bladder cancer has not been elucidated. MATERIAL/METHODS: Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction and immunohistochemistry were used to examine the expression of CEP78 in bladder cancer tissues and adjacent non-cancer tissues. RESULTS: Analysis of the RNA-Seq data from the TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) MIBC cohort (n=408) revealed that CEP78 was overexpressed in tumor tissues, which was confirmed with fresh-frozen and formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded specimens collected from 28 and 33 MIBC patients, respectively, in the present study. The clinicopathological relevance of CEP78 was further investigated. High CEP78 expression was found to be correlated with non-papillary histological type, luminal, basal-squamous and neuronal molecular subtypes, TP53 mutation, RB1 mutation, wild-type FGFR3, PPARG fusion and amplification, high total number of single-nucleotide variants, and high neoantigen load, but it was not associated with tumor stages or overall survival. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study suggest that CEP78 plays in a role in promoting the development of MIBC and could be a novel diagnostic and therapeutic target.