HELLS serves as a poor prognostic biomarker and its downregulation reserves the malignant phenotype in pancreatic cancer

BACKGROUND: SMARCAs, belonged to SWI/SNF2 subfamilies, are critical to cellular processes due to their modulation of chromatin remodeling processes. Although SMARCAs are implicated in the tumor progression of various cancer types, our understanding of how those members affect pancreatic carcinogenesis is quite limited and improving this requires bioinformatics analysis and biology approaches. METHODS: To address this issue, we investigated the transcriptional and survival data of SMARCAs in patients with pancreatic cancer using ONCOMINE, GEPIA, Human Protein Atlas, and Kaplan–Meier plotter. We further verified the effect of significant biomarker on pancreatic cancer in vitro through functional experiment. RESULTS: The Kaplan–Meier curve and log-rank test analyses showed a positive correlation between SMARCA1/2/3/SMARCAD1 and patients’ overall survival (OS). On the other hand, mRNA expression of SMARCA6 (also known as HELLS) showed a negative correlation with OS. Meanwhile, no significant correlation was found between SMARCA4/5/SMARCAL1 and tumor stages and OS. The knockdown of HELLS impaired the colony formation ability, and inhibited pancreatic cancer cell proliferation by arresting cells at S phase. CONCLUSIONS: Data mining analysis and cell function research demonstrated that HELLS played oncogenic roles in the development and progression of pancreatic cancer, and serve as a poor prognostic biomarker for pancreatic cancer. Our work laid a foundation for further clinical applications of HELLS in pancreatic cancer.