NF-κB signaling plays irreplaceable roles in cisplatin-induced bladder cancer chemoresistance and tumor progression

Bladder cancer (BCa) is the most vital urogenital malignant disease worldwide, bringing huge economic and social burden every year. Clinically, BCa is subdivided into superficial type and invasive type according to clinic-pathology, accompanied with different strategy of therapy. Number of reports indicate that 10-30% of superficial BCa will inevitable progress into invasive type, manifesting enhanced malignant behavior compared to original invasive type. Regardless of the original being an original invasive type or invasive type that progressed from superficial type of BCa, chemotherapy (including adjuvant or neo-adjuvant chemotherapy) in line with radiotherapy is the final regimen for BCa patients. Previous reports pointed out the high efficiency of cisplatin-containing chemotherapeutic regimen for BCa patients, leading to wide use of this regimen in BCa therapeutics. However, cisplatin-resistance inevitably appear, resulting in the failure of the BCa chemotherapy, the mechanism of which is still unknown. In the present study, parental BCa cell lines T24/J82 were used to obtain stable-cisplatin-resistance cell lines T24R/J82R, which showed enhanced capacity of malignancy, tumorigenesis and drug resistance, accompanied by elevated expression of EMT markers. The further mechanism investigation suggested that prolonged time of cisplatin-treatment contributed to the activation of the NF-κB signal, resulting in the upregulation of EMT markers, the maintenance of stem cell marker and the elevated expression of ABCB1. Thus, our study provides us a new view of the role of NF-κB signaling in BCa therapeutics.