Association of ATF4 Expression With Tissue Hypoxia and M2 Macrophage Infiltration in Infantile Hemangioma

Accumulating studies have revealed the hypoxic condition and its crucial role in the distinctive progression of infantile hemangioma (IH), the most common benign tumor in infancy. Activating transcription factor 4 (ATF4), an important gene mediating cellular adaptation to various stress signals, could confer a survival advantage for tumor cells under hypoxia and regulate tumor progression. However, the potential role of ATF4 in IH was still unknown. In this study, the expression of hypoxia inducible factor (HIF)-1α, ATF4, and macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF) in 27 specimens of IH was measured by immunochemistry and double-labeling immunofluorescence, followed by the Spearman rank correlation test. Our results showed that the expression of HIF-1α, ATF4, and M-CSF was significantly upregulated in proliferating IH compared with involuting IH. Meanwhile, HIF-1α and ATF4, in parallel with ATF4 and M-CSF, exhibited positive correlation and synchronous expression. In addition, our in vitro studies demonstrated that hypoxia obviously upregulated the expression of HIF-1α, ATF4, and M-CSF in hemangioma stem cells. Most importantly, their expression was uniformly correlated with the percentage of M2-polarized macrophages in IH. All those results and established evidence indicated that hypoxia-induced ATF4 expression may promote progression of proliferating IH through M-CSF-induced M2-polarized macrophages infiltration.