Yap Down-Regulated Its Target Ctgf To Maintain Stem Cell Pluripotency In Human Ovarian Cancer Stem-Like Cells

Recent studies have showed Yes-associated protein (YAP) plays a critical role in stem cell pluripotency maintenance. The former studies showed that it involved in ovarian cancer stem cell pluripotency maintenance but how does the downstream genes regulate remain to be explored yet. Here we first demonstrated the role of CTGF in the ovarian cancer stem-like cell (OCSC) self-renewal. We found that YAP down regulated the target gene CTGF to maintain OCSC un-differentiation and only CTGF gene was involved in stem cell pluripotency maintenance and direct regulated by YAP. Taken together, our data indicate that YAP regulated ovarian cancer initiated cell pluripotency by down regulated CTGF expression. This finding will proposed a new idea on hippo pathway regulation mechanism in cancer stem cell and it might serve as therapeutic targets for the treatment of ovarian cancer in clinical.