Haptoglobin expression correlates with tumor differentiation and five-year overall survival rate in hepatocellular carcinoma

PLoS One

Chun-San Tai¹  Ping-Yi Lin²  Shun-Long Weng³  Wen Liang Chen⁴  Yao-Li Chen⁴  Hsien-Da Huang⁴  Ya-Rong Huang⁵  Yan-Ren Lin⁵  Tsung-Han Teng⁶  Chih-Hung Chou⁷  Siang-Jyun Tu⁸  Wei-Chih Huang⁹ 

[1] Department of Biological Science and Technology, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;Department of Emergency Medicine, Changhua Christian Hospital, Changhua, Taiwan;Department of Medical Research, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan;Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;Institute of Molecular Medicine and Bioengineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;Program of Interdisciplinary Neuroscience, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan;School of Medicine, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan;School of Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan;Transplant Medicine & Surgery Research Centre, Changhua Christian Hospital, Changhua, Taiwan

关键词: Hepatocellular carcinoma;    Cell differentiation;    Differentiated tumors;    Protein expression;    Gene expression;    Prognosis;    Cancer stem cells;    Genomic databases;   

DOI  :  10.1371/journal.pone.0171269

学科分类：医学（综合）

来源: Public Library of Science

【 摘 要 】

Elevated serum haptoglobin (Hp) is identified as a prognostic marker in multiple types of solid tumors, which is correlated with poor prognosis. HCC is one of the major causes of cancer deaths in worldwide, which remains poor prognosis and is clinically urgent for discovering early diagnostic markers. However, except for serum Hp, the correlation of tumor Hp expression with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) progression is still unclear. In this study, we evaluated and identified the tissue Hp expression as a prognostic marker to predict the survival rate of HCC patients. To evaluate the prognostic value of Hp expression for HCC, two cohorts were enrolled in our study, including total 130 matched pair tissue sections (both adjacent non-tumorous and tumor tissue derived from same patient) of HCC patients from Changhua Christian Hospital (CCH) and total 316 RNA-seq data with clinical information of HCC patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. In contrast to other types of cancers, HCC tumor tissues have lower Hp protein expression in CCH cohort and have lower Hp mRNA expression in TCGA cohort as compared with adjacent non-tumorous tissues (p < 0.001). Moreover, lower Hp expression is significantly correlated with different stages of HCC cancer differentiation in CCH cohort (one-way ANOVA, p < 0.001). Most importantly, lower Hp expression is highly correlated with poor five-year overall survival rate in TCGA cohort (p < 0.01). Based on our data, we conclude that tissue Hp expression positively correlates with better HCC tumor differentiation and increased five-year overall survival rate of HCC patients. The results indicated that tissue Hp is potentially a prognostic marker for HCC patients. Our findings may further provide a new insight of effective treatments along with biopsy diagnosis of HCC patients.

【 授权许可】

CC BY