CD24 expression is a marker for predicting clinical outcome and regulates the epithelial-mesenchymal transition in ovarian cancer via both the Akt and ERK pathways

The degree of peritoneal dissemination and chemotherapy-resistant tumors is related to the prognosis in patients with advanced-stage ovarian cancer. The epithelial-mesenchymal-transition (EMT) is a multifaceted pathological program that endows cancer cells with the ability to invade and disseminate. CD24 is frequently overexpressed in various human cancers and is correlated with a poor prognosis. We herein examined the functions of CD24 in human ovarian cancer cell lines and evaluated how it contributes to the molecular mechanism underlying the regeneration of cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) through the EMT mechanism in ovarian carcinoma. We demonstrated that CD24 was expressed in 70.1% of primary ovarian carcinoma tissues, which were obtained from 174 patients, and that the expression of CD24 was an independent predictor of survival in patients with ovarian cancer. The expression of CD24 has been found to be correlated with the FIGO stage, presence of peritoneal and lymph node metastasis. CD24 induces the EMT phenomenon, which is involved in cell invasion, the highly proliferative phenotype, colony formation and which is associated with cisplatin resistance and the properties of CSCs, via the activation of PI3K/Akt, NF-κB and ERK in Caov-3 cisplatin-resistant cell lines. CD24-positive ovarian carcinomas have been shown to have a greater potential for intra-abdominal tumor cell dissemination in in vivo models. Our findings suggest that CD24 induced the EMT phenomenon in ovarian cancer, and that CD24 amplified cell growth-related intracellular signaling via the PI3K/Akt and MAPK pathways by affecting the EMT signal pathways. We believe that CD24 is a key molecule of metastatic progression in the EMT phenomenon and a promising therapeutic target for advanced ovarian cancer.