Genomic Heterogeneity of Translocation Renal Cell Carcinoma
Menée sur 4 lignées cellulaires et 16 échantillons tumoraux prélevés sur des patients atteints d'un carcinome à cellules rénales avec translocations impliquant les gènes TFEB et TFE3, cette étude met en évidence l'hétéréogénéité génomique de cette forme rare de cancer du rein
Résumé en anglais
Purpose: Translocation renal cell carcinoma (tRCC) is a rare subtype of kidney cancer involving the TFEB/TFE3 genes. We aimed to investigate the genomic and epigenetic features of this entity.
Experimental design: Cytogenomic analysis was performed with 250K single-nucleotide polymorphism microarrays on 16 tumor specimens and 4 cell lines. LINE-1 methylation, a surrogate marker of DNA methylation, was performed on 27 cases using pyrosequencing.
Results: tRCC showed cytogenomic heterogeneity, with 31.2% and 18.7% of cases presenting similarities with clear-cell and papillary RCC profiles, respectively. The most common alteration was a 17q gain in 7 tumors (44%), followed by a 9p loss in 6 cases (37%). Less frequent were losses of 3p and 17p in 5 cases (31%) each. Patients with 17q gain were older (P = 0.0006), displayed more genetic alterations (P < 0.003) and had a worse outcome (P = 0.002) than patients without it. Analysis comparing gene-expression profiling of a subset of tumors bearing 17q gain and those without suggest large scale dosage effects and TP53 haploinsufficiency without any somatic TP53 mutation identified. Cell-line based cytogenetic studies revealed that 17q gain can be related to isochromosome 17 and/or to multiple translocations occurring around 17q breakpoints. Finally, LINE-1 methylation was lower in tRCC tumors from adults compared to tumors from young patients (71.1% vs. 76.7%, P = 0.02).
Conclusions: Our results reveal genomic heterogeneity of tRCC with similarities to other renal tumor subtypes and raise important questions about the role of TFEB/TFE3 translocations and other chromosomal imbalances in tRCC biology.
