KK-LC-1 May Be An Effective Prognostic Biomarker for Gastric Cancer

Abstract

Background: To detect the protein expression of Kitakyushu lung cancer antigen 1 (KK-LC-1) in gastric cancer (GC) specimens, and to analyze the linear association of KK-LC-1 protein expression with clinical pathological data and prognosis.Methods: A total of 94 patients in this study were all GC patients with surgical resection. KK-LC-1’s protein expression in GC tissue was detected by immunohistochemistry. This report applies Histological score (H-score) to evaluate KK-LC-1’s expression. Chi-square test, Kaplan-Meier method and Cox regression were used to analyze the linear association between KK-LC-1 expression and clinicopathological data and prognosis.Results: KK-LC-1’s protein expression in the cytoplasm of tumor tissue was found to be significantly higher than that in normal tissue (P <0.001). If we apply the median value of H-value as the cut-off point, it suggests that overall survival for GC patients with high KK-LC-1 expression levels in the cytoplasm was good (P = 0.016), and still had statistical significance after Cox regression analysis. At the same time, the study found that there was a negative correlation between KK-LC-1’s protein expression and the pathological grade of the tumor (P = 0.036).Conclusions: Our research data shows that KK-LC-1’s expression in GC is higher than that of normal tissues, which is associated with a longer overall survival in GC. KK-LC-1 can be used as a biomarker for GC patients with good prognosis.