Role of APOA1 in the resistance to platinum-based chemotherapy in squamous cervical cancer

BACKGROUND: To investigate the mechanism by which apolipoprotein A1 (APOA1) enhances the resistance of cervical squamous carcinoma to platinum-based chemotherapy. METHODS: Two cervical squamous carcinoma cell lines (SiHa and Caski) overexpressing APOA1 were constructed, treated with carboplatin, and compared to normal control cells. RESULTS: In both SiHa and Caski cell lines, the clone-forming ability of CBP-treated cells was lower than that of untreated cells, and the change in the number of clones of overexpressing cells was lower than that of normal control cells (p < 0.05), indicating that APOA1 overexpression enhanced chemoresistance. A screen for APOA1 downstream proteins affecting platinum-based chemoresistance using Tandem Mass Tag revealed 64 differentially expressed proteins in SiHa cells, which were subjected to Gene Ontology (annotation, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes enrichment, subcellular localization, structural domain annotation and enrichment, clustering, and interaction network analyses. Sixty-four differentially expressed proteins matching cancer-relavent association terms were screened and parallel response monitoring identified 29 proteins as possibly involved in the mechanism of platinum-based chemoresistance. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis suggested that the mechanism may involve numerous regulatory pathways, including promoting tumor growth via the p38 MAPK signaling pathway through STAT1, promoting tumor progression via the PI3K signaling pathway through CD81 and C3, and promoting resistance to platinum-based chemotherapy resistance through TOP2A. The present study aimed to preliminarily explore the function and mechanism of APOA1 in platinum-based chemoresistance in cervical cancer, and the detailed mechanism needs to be further studied.