Abstract
Kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC) is the most common and aggressive type of renal cell carcinoma. Due to high mortality rate, high metastasis rate and chemical resistance, the prognosis of KIRC patients is poor. Therefore, it is necessary to study the mechanisms of KIRC development and to develop more effective prognostic molecular biomarkers to help clinical patients. In our study, we used The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases to investigate that the expression of nuclear factor I B (NFIB) is significantly higher in KIRC than in adjacent tissues. Moreover, NFIB expression levels are associated with multiple clinical pathological parameters of KIRC, and KIRC patients with high NFIB expression have poor prognosis, suggesting that NFIB may play vital roles in the malignant development of KIRC. Further studies demonstrated that NFIB could promote the progression and metastasis of KIRC and participate in the regulation of PTEN induced kinase 1 (PINK1). Furthermore, we used chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) experiments to confirm that NFIB binds to the PINK1 promoter and regulates its expression at the transcriptional level. Further experiments also confirmed the important roles of PINK1 in promoting the development of tumors by NFIB. Hence, our data provide a new NFIB-mediated regulatory mechanism for the tumor progression of KIRC and suggest that NFIB can be applied as a new predictor and therapeutic target for KIRC.