CD47 promotes cell growth and motility in epithelial ovarian cancer

[Display omitted] •CD47 was positively and significantly correlated with tumor histology and grade.•CD47 promotes cell growth, migration and invasion.•CD47 may be a useful surface marker and offer a novel therapeutic option in epithelial ovarian cancer. Endometriosis is considered a high risk factor for the development of ovarian carcinoma, including clear cell and endometrioid malignancies. The mechanism by which endometriosis-associated ovarian cancer (EAOC) avoids anti-tumor immune surveillance by macrophages remains unclear, but CD47 is a very important immune checkpoint for macrophage phagocytosis. Therefore, we collected 36 clinical ovarian samples and detected the protein profile of CD47 by immunohistochemistry and analyzed the correlation with clinical pathological features using statistical software. We found that CD47 expression was relatively higher in patients with EAOC compared with the normal group. High CD47 expression was positively and significantly correlated with histology (P = 0.007) and tumor grade (P = 0.002). We also found that CD47 overexpression promotes cancer cell growth and motility in the TOV-112D and TOV-21G cell lines. Silencing CD47 and anti-CD47 mAb inhibit cancer cell growth and motility in cancer cell lines. Together, these results demonstrate that CD47 in EAOC may be a useful surface marker and offer a novel therapeutic option by targeting CD47 in ovarian cancer.