Myeloid derived suppressor cells enhance stemness of cancer cells by inducing miRNA101 and suppressing the corepressor CtBP2

The work identifies an immune associated cellular, molecular and clinical network involving MDSCs-microRNA101-CtBP2-stem cell core genes, which extrinsically controls cancer stemness and impacts patient outcome. Primary ovarian cancer cells (5 x105) were co-cultured with freshly sorted ovarian cancer associated-MDSCs, peripheral blood lin-CD45+CD33+ cells (5 x105) or medium in a transwell (Corning) for 24 hours. Then, RNA was extracted from the cancer cells by Trizol reagent. The RNAs were applied for microRNA profiling using OpenArray system (Applied Biosystems, Cat# 4470187) (Mestdagh et al., 2008) at University of Michigan Sequencing Core