GOLPH3 promotes cell proliferation and malignancy in Hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma via AKT-mTOR axis activation

Hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (HSCC) is a type of the head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), and it tends to have malignant transformation and result in poor prognosis effected by oncogene. Studies have shown that Golgi phosphoprotein 3 (GOLPH3) is highly expressed in HNSCC, which can activate AKT-mTOR signaling pathway. However, the functions of GOLPH3 in HSCC was unclear. Based on the analysis of 520 patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, we employed GOLPH3 stable knockdown and overexpression of FaDu cell lines to investigated that function and impact of GOLPH3 on HSCC in vitro and vivo. The functions and pathway of genes that positively related to GOLPH3 via enrichment analysis and western blot. Our results showed that GOLPH3 promotes HSCC cells proliferation, migration and subcutaneous tumor in vivo. We confirmed the positive correlation between GOLPH3 and AKT-mTOR signal activation in vitro. Enrichment analysis indicated that GOLPH3 is critical for HSCC development. Taken together, GOLPH3 promotes tumor cells proliferation and malignancy via AKT-mTOR signal activation, and this mechanism may be a key factor for HSCC tumor malignancy. It may provide an important target for clinical treatment of HSCC.