MCAM is associated with metastasis and poor prognosis in osteosarcoma by modulating tumor cell migration

Although there are standard treatment options for osteosarcoma (OS), the prognoses of patients with OS remain varied. Therefore, it is important to profile OS patients at a high risk of mortality to develop focused interventions. Although tumor biomarkers are closely associated with clinical outcomes, data on prognostic biomarkers for OS remain scarce.

We collected RNA expression profiles and clinical data of 90 OS patients from the GEO database (dataset GSE21257 and GSE39055) and 96 patients in the TARGET program. The data were analyzed using univariate Kaplan-Meier survival analysis to screen candidate gene sets that might be associated with OS survival.

Our analysis demonstrated that melanoma cell adhesion molecule (MCAM) was associated with overall survival of patients with OS in the three cohorts. The data showed that MCAM was upregulated in OS patients who had metastases within 5 years compared to those without metastases. GO analysis revealed that genes correlated with MCAM were mainly involved in cell migration and wound healing processes. In addition, wound healing assays and gene set enrichment analysis results from RNA sequencing data of small interfering (si)-MCAM-transfected OS cells demonstrated that MCAM modulated tumor cell migration.

Our data demonstrate that MCAM may be a novel prognostic biomarker for OS. MCAM is associated with increased cell migration ability and risk of metastasis, thus leading to poor prognoses in OS patients.