Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) shows low response to most conventional chemotherapies. To facilitate target identification for novel therapeutic development, we deployed gene expression profiling on 43 paired HCC tumors and adjacent non-tumoral liver, which is also considered as the pre-malignant liver lesion. In conjunction with ontology analysis, a major functional process found to play a role in the malignant transformation of HCC was microtubule-related cellular assembly. We further examined the potential use of microtubule targeting taxane drugs, including paclitaxel and docetaxel, and compared with findings to results from doxorubicin, a common chemotherapeutic agent used in HCC. Recent studies showed that drug delivery by nanoparticles have enhanced efficacy with reduced side effects. In this regard, the nanoparticle albumin-bound (nab)-paclitaxel was also examined. In a panel of HCC cell lines studied, a high sensitivity towards taxane drugs was generally found, although the effect from nab-paclitaxel was most profound. The nab-paclitaxel showed an effective IC50 dose at 15-fold lower than paclitaxel alone or the derivative analogue docetaxel, and ~450-fold less compared to doxorubicin. Flow cytometric analysis confirmed a cell cycle blockade at the G2/M phase and increased apoptosis following nab-paclitaxel treatment. In vivo animal studies also showed that nab-paclitaxel readily inhibited xenograft growth with less toxicity to host cells compared to other anti-microtubule drugs and doxorubicin. Gene silencing of the microtubule regulatory gene STMN1 by RNAi suggested a distinct synergistic effect in the combined treatment with nab-paclitaxel. Our findings in this study highly suggest that the microtubule assembly represents a promising therapeutic target development in HCC.

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