The Hippo signalling pathway is tumour suppressor cascade with a central role in the regulation of fundamental cellular biological processes, such as cell proliferation, apoptosis, organ size control and stem cell functions. The Hippo pathway transduces external signals that come to the cell into the nucleus, where it can control the expression of specific target genes, mainly involved in cell proliferation and differentiation. The Hippo pathway is an inhibitory pathway that control by phosphorylation and inhibition Yes-associated protein (YAP) coactivator, one of the two nuclear effectors of this signalling, involved in the regulation of proliferation and organ size.
As consequence, deregulation of Hippo tumor suppressor pathway or hyperactivation of its downstream effectors is often associated with formation, development and tumour dissemination.
Consistently, YAP is often over-expressed in a broad range of different tumours and it has aberrant activity in breast cancer as well as in several other human carcinomas. Up-regulation of YAP activity increases stem cell self-renewal in normal and cancer stem cells.
In this work we describe the identification of a new hormonal-dependent layer for YAP regulation in breast cancer by the glucocorticoids and we analyze the mechanisms through which this regulation occurs. We found that Glucocorticoid Receptor (GR) binds directly the YAP promoter and induces the transcription of YAP mRNA after GC stimulation in cancer cells. Moreover, GC lead to efficient YAP de-phosphorylation and transcriptional activation, in a transcription-independent manner, by inducing actin cytoskeleton reorganization.
Importantly, inhibition of the GR by means of RU486 (GR competitive antagonist) strongly blunted the expansion of the cancer stem cell pool in breast cancer cells by blunting the GR/YAP axis.
