Overexpression of miR-146a in basal-like breast cancer cells confers enhanced tumorigenic potential in association with altered p53 status

The tumor suppressor p53 is the most frequently mutated gene in human cancers, mutated in 25-30% of breast cancers. However, mutation rates differ according to breast cancer subtype, being more prevalent in aggressive estrogen receptor-negative tumors and basal-like and HER2-amplified subtypes. This heterogeneity suggests that p53 may function differently across breast cancer subtypes. We used RNAi-mediated p53 knockdown (KD) and antagomir-mediated KD of microRNAs to study how gene expression and cellular response to p53 loss differ in luminal versus basal-like breast cancer. As expected, p53 loss caused downregulation of established p53 targets (e.g. p21 and miR-34 family) and increased proliferation in both luminal and basal-like cell lines. However, some p53-dependent changes were subtype specific, including expression of miR-134, miR-146a and miR-181b. To study the cellular response to miR-146a upregulation in p53-impaired basal-like lines, antagomir KD of miR-146a was performed. KD of miR-146a caused decreased proliferation and increased apoptosis, effectively ablating the effects of p53 loss. Furthermore, we found that miR-146a upregulation decreased NF-κB expression and downregulated the NF-κB-dependent extrinsic apoptotic pathway (including tumor necrosis factor, FADD and TRADD) and antagomir-mediated miR-146a KD restored expression of these components, suggesting a plausible mechanism for miR-146a-dependent cellular responses. These findings are relevant to human basal-like tumor progression in vivo, since miR-146a is highly expressed in p53 mutant basal-like breast cancers. These findings suggest that targeting miR-146a expression may have value for altering the aggressiveness of p53 mutant basal-like tumors.