Polo-like kinase 4 (PLK4) is overexpressed in central nervous system neuroblastoma (CNS-NB)

Neuroblastoma (NB) is the most common extracranial solid tumor in pediatrics, with rare occurrences of primary and metastatic tumors in the central nervous system (CNS). We previously reported the overexpression of the polo-like kinase4 ( PLK4) in embryonal brain tumors. PLK4has also been found to be overexpressed in a variety of peripheral adult tumors and recently in peripheral NB. Here, we investigated PLK4expression in NBs of the CNS (CNS-NB) and validated our findings by performing a multi-platform transcriptomic meta-analysis using publicly available data. We evaluated the PLK4expression by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) on the CNS-NB samples and compared the relative expression levels among other embryonaland non- embryonal brain tumors. The relative PLK4expression levels of the NB samples were found to be significantly higher than the non- embryonal brain tumors(p-value < 0.0001 in both our samples and in public databases). Here, we expand upon our previous work that detected PLK4overexpression in pediatric embryonaltumors to include CNS-NB. As we previously reported, inhibiting PLK4in embryonaltumors led to decreased tumor cell proliferation, survival, invasion and migration in vitro and tumor growth in vivo, and therefore PLK4may be a potential new therapeutic approach to CNS-NB.