Background: Ovarian and endometrial high-grade serous carcinomas (HGSCs) have similar clinical and pathological characteristics; however, exhaustive protein expression profiling of these cancers has yet to be reported.
Methods: We performed protein expression profiling on 14 cases of HGSCs (7 ovarian and 7 endometrial) and 18 endometrioid carcinomas (9 ovarian and 9 endometrial) using iTRAQ-based exhaustive and quantitative protein analysis.
Results: We identified 828 tumour-expressed proteins and evaluated the statistical similarity of protein expression profiles between ovarian and endometrial HGSCs using unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis (P<0.01). Using 45 statistically highly expressed proteins in HGSCs, protein ontology analysis detected two enriched terms and proteins composing each term: IMP2 and MCM2. Immunohistochemical analyses confirmed the higher expression of IMP2 and MCM2 in ovarian and endometrial HGSCs as well as in tubal and peritoneal HGSCs than in endometrioid carcinomas (P<0.01). The knockdown of either IMP2 or MCM2 by siRNA interference significantly decreased the proliferation rate of ovarian HGSC cell line (P<0.01).
Conclusions: We demonstrated the statistical similarity of the protein expression profiles of ovarian and endometrial HGSC beyond the organs. We suggest that increased IMP2 and MCM2 expression may underlie some of the rapid HGSC growth observed clinically.