Polo-Like Kinase 4 (PLK4) Is Overexpressed in Central Nervous System Neuroblastoma (CNS-NB)

• Main Authors: Anders W. Bailey, Amreena Suri, Pauline M. Chou, Tatiana Pundy, Samantha Gadd, Stacey L. Raimondi, Tadanori Tomita, Simone Treiger Sredni
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-11-01
• Series: Bioengineering
• Subjects: embryonal brain tumor; pediatric; CNS-PNET; low grade glioma; rhabdoid; ATRT; medulloblastoma; kinase inhibitor
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5354/5/4/96

Neuroblastoma (NB) is the most common extracranial solid tumor in pediatrics, with rare occurrences of primary and metastatic tumors in the central nervous system (CNS). We previously reported the overexpression of the polo-like kinase 4 (PLK4) in embryonal brain tumors. PLK4 has also been found to be overexpressed in a variety of peripheral adult tumors and recently in peripheral NB. Here, we investigated <i>PLK4</i> expression in NBs of the CNS (CNS-NB) and validated our findings by performing a multi-platform transcriptomic meta-analysis using publicly available data. We evaluated the <i>PLK4</i> expression by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) on the CNS-NB samples and compared the relative expression levels among other embryonal and non-embryonal brain tumors. The relative <i>PLK4</i> expression levels of the NB samples were found to be significantly higher than the non-embryonal brain tumors (<i>p</i>-value &lt; 0.0001 in both our samples and in public databases). Here, we expand upon our previous work that detected <i>PLK4</i> overexpression in pediatric embryonal tumors to include CNS-NB. As we previously reported, inhibiting PLK4 in embryonal tumors led to decreased tumor cell proliferation, survival, invasion and migration in vitro and tumor growth in vivo, and therefore PLK4 may be a potential new therapeutic approach to CNS-NB.