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BookmarkScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2009) — Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common malignancies in the world with a high incidence and death rate. TNM staging system is used worldwide to predict prognosis and direct therapeutic decisions of patients with GC. However, the prognoses of patients with stage 2 and 3 GC are more heterogeneous and less predictable by staging criteria.
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Therefore, finding molecular markers that are able to predict the potential of tumor recurrence and prognosis of patients is extremely important for appropriate individualized therapy.
Phosphatase regenerating liver 3 (PRL-3), a member of phosphotase of regenerating liver, has aroused broad attention in the research area of tumor metastasis. A growing body of evidence has proved PRL-3 to be an important metastatic instrumental molecule. In gastric cancer, PRL-3 was found to be highly expressed in tumor metastatic lymph nodes and closely associated with the peritoneal metastasis, but the prognostic impact of PRL-3 expression in gastric cancer still remains to be further investigated.
A research team led by Dr. Ji-You Li from Peking University University addressed this issue.
In their study, PRL-3 expression in paraffin-embedded tumor specimens from 293 patients with gastric cancer was studied retrospectively by immunohistochemistry. Monoclonal antibody specifically against PRL-3, 3B6, was obtained with hybridoma technique.
Positive PRL-3 expression was detected in 43.3% (127 of 293) of gastric cancer cases. High expression of PRL-3 was positively correlated with tumor size, depth of invasion, vascular/lymphatic invasion, lymph node metastasis, high TNM stage and tumor recurrence. Patients with positive PRL-3 expression had a significantly lower 5-year survival rate than those with negative expression (28.3% vs 51.9%, P < 0.0001). Patients who received curative surgery, and with positive PRL-3 expression had a significant shorter overall survival and disease-free disadvantage over patients with negative expression (hazard ratio of 16.7 and 16.6, respectively; P < 0.0001 for both). Multivariate analysis revealed that PRL-3 expression was an independent prognostic indicator for overall and disease-free survival of gastric cancer patients, particularly for survival in TNM stage 3 patients.
Their result indicated that PRL-3 expression is a new independent prognostic indicator to predict the potential of recurrence and survival in patients with gastric cancer at the time of tumor resection.
Journal reference:
- Dai et al. Expression of phosphatase regenerating liver 3 is an independent prognostic indicator for gastric cancer. World Journal of Gastroenterology, 2009; 15 (12): 1499 DOI: 10.3748/wjg.15.1499
