The incidence of thyroid cancer is staying at a high level. Claudin family is a skelemin contacting with the intercellular junction and can keep a dynamic balance between cells. Recently, many types of research indicated that the expression level of claudins is closely related to various cancer types and they can be novel diagnostic markers. For instance, Claudin-10(CLDN10) is the high expression in primary hepatocellular carcinoma, papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) and so on. But the biological role and function of CLDN10 in PTC are unclear. In our study, we measured the expression of CLDN10 in human normal tissues and matched PTC tissues by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and this observation was consistent with that in the TCGA cohort. We discovered that high expression of CLDN10 was correlated with lymph node metastasis, age and Histological type in TCGA cohorts. Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that patients with higher CLDN10 expression had a worse overall survival. In vitro, CLDN10 could promote cellular proliferation, migration, and invasion in PTC cell lines. In a word, CLDN10 is a functionally gene facilitating tumorgenesis in PTC and acts as an oncogene in PTC.
Keywords: CLDN10; PTC; tumorigenesis.