Urine-derived stem cells (USC) are isolated from voided urine and have demonstrated potential for use in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is a common urological malignancy that originates in the kidney. Since USC also originate in the kidney, the objective of this study was to investigate any biological differences between USC isolated from healthy patients and those isolated from ccRCC patients (rc-USC). We found that USC can be isolated from the voided urine of ccRCC patients (rc-USC) and have a morphology and function similar to those isolated from healthy donors. However, the rc-USC showed greater proliferation and invasion capacity than USC, and possessed some features of cancer cells; but the rc-UC were not able to form xenografts when implanted in vivo. We further performed RNA sequencing of rc-USC and USC and found several differentially expressed lncRNAs and mRNAs; however subsequent GO and KEGG enrichment analysis showed few pathway differences between these cells. Bioinformatic analyses and RT-PCR showed the expression of several known ccRCC-related genes in rc-USC expressed, as compared to USC derived from healthy donors. This study demonstrates that rc-USC displayed several cellular and genetic features of ccRCC cells, which suggests that this population of cells could provide a non-invasive approach for for the diagnosis, predication, disease modeling and therapeutic strategies targeting ccRCC.
Keywords: RNA sequencing; Urine-derived stem cells; clear cell renal cell cancer; mesenchymal stromal cells; tumor-associated stromal cells.
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