Abstract: AIM: To investigate the effect of short hairpin RNA (shRNA) targeting insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) gene on the growth and cell cycle of human bladder cancer cells. METHODS: Human bladder cancer cells HTB-95637 were available for this study. Some small interfering RNA (siRNA) fragments targeting IGF2 gene were designed, and those could silence the target gene sequence efficiently were chosen. Then, the shRNA recombiant adenovirus expression vectors were structured. These vectors were transfected to HTB-95637 cells subsequently, and the cell clones could express targeting plasmid stably were screened. Afterwards, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and western blot were used to detect the expression level of IGF2 mRNA and protein, MTT method was used to detect the proliferation of the HTB-95637 cells, and PI single staining flow cytometry was used to analysis the change of cell cycle. RESULTS: The results of RT-PCR and Western blot indicated that the designed shRNA could down-regulate the mRNA and protein expression of IGF2 gene. The growth rate of the HTB-95637 cells transfected with IGF2-shRNA was slower than that in other groups. Compared with other groups, the percentage of cells in S phase increased from 42.0%±3.8% to 70.2%±5.2% and those in G₂/M phase decreased from 9.7%±2.4% to 1.5%±1.6% when transfected with IGF2-shRNA.CONCLUSION: The shRNA targeting IGF2 gene could inhibit the gene expression, regulated the cell cycle and restrained the cell proliferation of human bladder cancer cells.

Key words: bladder cancer, insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2), siRNA, cell proliferation, cell cycle