Upregulated Expression of TAP1 Promotes Progression of HPV+ Cervical Squamous Intraepithelial Lesions

Abstract

There are still a significant number of cervical squamous intraepithelial lesions (CSIL) that progress to cervical cancer in the short term, despite the great improvements in HPV vaccines. Transporter associated with antigen processing 1 (TAP1) is a molecule involved in the processing and presentation of major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC-I) restricted antigens. Previous studies have shown that TAP1 is aberrantly expressed in a variety of cancers and is involved in cancer immunity. However, the function of TAP1 in CSIL remains unclear. In this study, 130 HPV-infected patients were examined to investigate the role and possible mechanism of TAP1 in CSIL. In addition, we found that TAP1 was up-regulated and positively correlated with P16 and Ki67 in cervical squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) from the TCGA and GTEx databases, and the TAP1-high group showed a worse prognosis. TAP1 was also found to be up-regulated in LSIL, HSIL and SCC in 130 clinical samples and was positively correlated with P16 and Ki67. We confirmed that TAP1 promotes the progression of CSIL and facilitates the proliferation and migration of cervical SCC through a combination of bioinformatics analysis and experiments. Therefore, a novel and potential mechanism was proposed that TAP1 regulates the malignant progression of CSIL by inhibiting tumour immune activation. Our study provides a new perspective for the treatment and diagnosis of cervical SCC.