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Elevated levels of epithelial cell transforming sequence 2 predicts poor prognosis for prostate cancer

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Abstract

Epithelial cell transforming sequence 2 (Ect2) was originally reported as an oncogene that is involved in several types of human cancers. However, little is known about its expression and function in prostate cancer. Immunohistochemical staining for Ect2 was performed on a human tissue microarray. The staining intensity was analyzed in association with clinical pathological parameters such as Gleason score, pathological grade, clinical stage, tumor invasion, lymph node and distant metastasis. Furthermore, we repeated such analysis and investigated the prognostic value of Ect2 using the TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) Dataset. Our immunohistochemical results showed that the expression levels of Ect2 protein were enhanced in human prostate cancer tissues. There existed positive correlations between the expression levels of Ect2 and several clinicopathological parameters, including advanced clinical stage, enhanced tumor invasion and lymph node metastasis. Similarly, we found that the expression levels of Ect2 were positively related to Gleason score, tumor invasion, lymph node metastasis and high distant metastasis in the TCGA Dataset. Kaplan–Meier analysis revealed that lower levels of Ect2 mRNA predicted higher overall survivals and biochemical recurrence (BCR)-free survivals in all patients or non-metastatic patients. Multivariate analysis by Cox regression showed that the expression of Ect2 could be an independent prognostic marker of poor BCR-free survivals. Therefore, levels of Ect2 may serve as a novel marker for the diagnosis or prognosis of prostate cancer.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No: 81472382, 81672550), the Guangdong Province Natural Science Foundation (No: 2014A030313079), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No: 14ykpy19), Guangdong Province Science and Technology for Social Development Project (No: 2013B021800107), Guangdong Province Science and Technology for International Cooperation of Science (No: 2016A050502020)and Guangzhou City 2015 Scientific Research Projects (No: 201510010298) to Hai Huang; and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No: 81272807) to Zhenghui Guo.

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Department of Urology, The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510120, China

      Zhenghui Guo, Xianju Chen, Dingjun Zhu, Yiming Lai, Wen Dong, Wanhua Wu, Chunhao Lin & Hai Huang

    2. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Malignant Tumor Epigenetics and Gene Regulation, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510120, China

      Zhenghui Guo, Xianju Chen, Tao Du, Dingjun Zhu & Hai Huang

    3. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510120, China

      Tao Du

    4. Center for Translational Cancer Research, Texas A&M Institute of Biosciences and Technology, Texas A&M University, 2121 W. Holcombe Blvd., Houston, TX, 77030, USA

      Leyuan Liu & Hai Huang

    5. Department of Molecular and Cellular Medicine, College of Medicine, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

      Leyuan Liu

    Authors
    1. Zhenghui Guo
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    Correspondence to Leyuan Liu or Hai Huang.

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    All the authors declare no conflict of interest.

    Ethical approval

    All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This project is a retrospective study and in accordance with ethics review regulations and was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University on December 30, 2015.

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    Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

    Additional information

    Zhenghui Guo, Xianju Chen and Tao Du contributed equally to this work.

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    Guo, Z., Chen, X., Du, T. et al. Elevated levels of epithelial cell transforming sequence 2 predicts poor prognosis for prostate cancer. Med Oncol 34, 13 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12032-016-0872-3

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    • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12032-016-0872-3

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