Investigation of Expression Profile of Placenta-specific 1 (PLAC1) in Acute Myeloid and Lymphoid Leukemias

Parastou Gholami; Hossein Asgarian-Omran; Marjan Yaghmaie; Jafar Mahmudian; Shirin Kianersi; Sina Salari; Ehsan Zaboli; Mahmood Jeddi-Tehrani; Amir-Hassan Zarnani; Mahdi Shabani

doi:10.18502/ajmb.v15i3.12926

Investigation of Expression Profile of Placenta-specific 1 (PLAC1) in Acute Myeloid and Lymphoid Leukemias

Avicenna J Med Biotechnol. 2023 Jul-Sep;15(3):167-172. doi: 10.18502/ajmb.v15i3.12926.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
² Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Sari, Iran.
³ Hematology-Oncology and Stem Cell Transplantation Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
⁴ Monoclonal Antibody Research Center, Avicenna Research Institute, ACECR, Tehran, Iran.
⁵ HSCT Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
⁶ Gastrointestinal Cancer Research Center, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Sari, Iran.
⁷ Department of Immunology, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
⁸ Reproductive Biotechnology Research Center, Avicenna Research Institute, ACECR, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Background: Placenta-specific 1 (PLAC1) is one of the cancer-testis-placenta antigens that has no expression in normal tissue except placenta trophoblast and testicular germ cells, but is overexpressed in a variety of solid tumors. There is a lack of studies on the expression of PLAC1 in leukemia. We investigated expression of PLAC1 in Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL).

Methods: In this study, we investigated expression pattern of PLAC1 gene in peripheral blood and bone marrow mononuclear cells of newly-diagnosed patients with AML (n=31) and ALL (n=31) using quantitative real-time PCR. Normal subjects (n=17) were considered as control. The PLAC1 protein expression in the samples were also detected using western blotting.

Results: Our data demonstrated that PLAC1 transcripts had 2.7 and 2.9 fold-change increase in AML and ALL, respectively, compared to normal samples. PLAC1 transcript expression was totally negative in all studied normal subjects. Level of PLAC1 mRNA expression in ALL statistically increased compared to normal samples (p=0.038). However, relative mRNA expression of PLAC1 in AML was not significant in comparison to normal subjects (p=0.848). Furthermore, relative mRNA expression of PLAC1 in AML subtypes was not statistically significant (p=0.756). PLAC1 gene expression showed no difference in demographical clinical and para-clinical parameters. Western blotting confirmed expression of PLAC1 in the ALL and AML samples.

Conclusion: Considering PLAC1 expression profile in acute leukemia, PLAC1 could be a potential marker in leukemia which needs complementary studies in the future.

Keywords: Acute Myeloid Leukemia; Acute lymphoblastic leukemia; Biomarker; Expression profile; Leukemia; PLAC1.