siRNA-based Therapeutic Candidate Targeting PRDM2 for Inhibition of Lung Cancer Progression

Lung cancer is the leading cause of tumor-related fatalities worldwide. The current precision therapies are effective but target only those molecules that are impacted in a minority of lung cancer patients. Positive Regulatory Domain 2 (PRDM2), a member of the PRDM gene family, also known as Retinoblastoma Interacting Zinc finger (RIZ) protein. RIZ is found to be misregulated in more than 60% of lung cancer patients, representing a significantly affected population when compared to other mutation-prone oncogenic factors. RIZ expresses two contrasting variants, a tumor suppressor RIZ1, and an oncogenic RIZ2 protein. In lung cancer, the RIZ1/RIZ2 ratio alters, and the epigenetic silencing of RIZ1 promotes RIZ2 overexpression. In this study, we used siRNA (ARIZ-047) to knockdown and inhibit the effect of the oncogenic protein RIZ2. Inhibiting RIZ2 with ARIZ-047 treatment increased RIZ1 expression and decreased the viability of a lung cancer cell line (A549). The ARIZ-047 treatment also upregulated the negative regulators of the Wnt signaling pathway and restrained the tumor progression in the xenograft mice model. In conclusion, this study identifies ARIZ-047 as a targeted therapy in lung cancer, which specifically inhibits RIZ2 and suggests the role of the Wnt signaling pathway in RIZ2 overexpression.