ICT1 predicts a poor survival and correlated with cell proliferation in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

Immature colon carcinoma transcript-1 (ICT1) is a crucial member of the large mitoribosomal subunit in mitochondrial ribosome, which has been shown to be closely related to tumorigenesis. Its expression and function in human diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), however, remained elusive. In this study, analysis of public available Oncomine database suggested that the expression levels of ICT1 mRNA was significantly upregulated in DLBCL tissues. Consistently, we described ICT1 was remarkably upregulated in fresh DLBCL samples compared with the corresponding normal tissues using quantitative reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and Western blotting. Moreover, ICT1 overexpression was associated with the poor overall survival (OS) of DLBCL patients. Finally, we used DLBCL cell lines to further probe the potential mechanisms, and found shRNA-mediated knockdown of ICT1 significantly suppressed DLBCL cell proliferation, induced cell cycle arrest at G0/G1 phase and apoptosis in vitro. Further verification showed that inhibition of ICT1 gene expression caused the upregulation of the p21, Bad and caspase-3, and downregulation of PCNA, Survivin, CDK4, CDK6 and Cyclin D1. Taken together, this study suggested that ICT1 may play an oncogenic role in human DLBCL by promoting cell proliferation and it might be a biomarker of unfavorable prognosis in DLBCL patients.