Expression of Girdin in primary hepatocellular carcinoma and its effect on cell proliferation and invasion

Girdin has been proven to play a vital role in the process of proliferation, apoptosis, and invasion in various cancer cells, yet the underlying molecular mechanism in primary hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has not yet been clarified. Thereafter, we performed immunohistochemistry to detect the expression of Girdin in 40 primary HCC tissues and 30 matched adjacent tissues using hepatic carcinoma tissue microarray. Our data showed that the positive expression rate of Girdin in hepatocellular carcinoma tissues was 67.5%, higher than that found in adjacent tissues of 16.7% (P < 0.05). It closely correlates to tumor size, T stage, TNM stage and Edmondson-Steiner stage (P < 0.05) of HCC patients. After specific small interfering RNA of Girdin was transfected into HepG2 and Huh7.5.1 cells, the proliferation and invasion ability of tumor cells were significantly inhibited. In summary, we suggest that the oncogenic role of Girdin could provide new molecular target for the treatment of HCC.