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Molecular Oncology, Markers, Clinical Correlates |
1 Departments of Surgery and Clinical Oncology and 2 Pathology, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka, and 3 Department of Surgery, Osaka Medical Center for Cancer and Cardiovascular Diseases, Osaka, Osaka, Japan
| ABSTRACT |
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B signaling pathway. The present study was designed to investigate the prognostic significance of VCP expression in colorectal adenocarcinoma. Experimental Design: We analyzed VCP expression immunohistochemically in 129 patients with colorectal carcinoma ages 3584 years. The staining intensity of tumor cells was categorized as either weaker-to-equal (low VCP expression) or stronger (high expression) than that in noncancerous colonic mucosa. We also analyzed 8 colorectal adenomas and 10 metastatic foci.
Results: Low VCP expression was noted in 41 (31.8%) cases and high expression in 88 (68.2%) cases. A low level of VCP expression was noted in all adenomas, whereas a high level was seen in all metastatic tumors. A significant difference was observed in depth of invasion (T12 versus T34, P < 0.05), presence or absence of venous invasion (P < 0.05), and tumor stage (I and II versus III and IV; P < 0.05) between adenocarcinomas with low and high VCP expression. Patients with high VCP-expressing tumors had a higher recurrence rate (P < 0.001) and poorer disease-free and overall survival (P < 0.01 and P < 0.05, respectively) compared with the low expression group. Multivariate analysis revealed VCP expression level to be an independent prognosticator for both disease-free and overall survival. VCP level was an indicator of disease-free survival in both stage II and III (pathological Tumor-Node-Metastasis classification, P < 0.05 and <0.01, respectively).
Conclusions: A high expression level of VCP in tumors is a poor prognostic marker in patients with colorectal carcinomas.
| INTRODUCTION |
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30% of patients who undergo curative resection die within a few years after surgery (2)
. The main cause of the unfavorable prognosis is tumor metastasis, mainly to the liver (3)
. It has been reported that tumor cell metastasis is not a random event but that it arises from a tumor cell subpopulation with higher metastatic potential, which has a variety of specific biological characteristics (4)
. Therefore, identification of novel informative indices to apply at the time of surgery for primary colorectal carcinomas may aid in identifying tumors with higher metastatic potential. This could lead to improved prognostication and hence more appropriate therapeutic approaches with adjuvant treatments. At present, the pathological stage of tumors according to the Tumor-Node-Metastasis staging system (pTNM stage; Ref. 5 ) is regarded as one of the most important predictors of risk of recurrence after potentially curative resection for colorectal adenocarcinoma (2) . However, prognoses of patients with colorectal carcinomas vary, even within tumors of the same stage (3) , and therefore identification of additional factors predicting recurrence of the tumor would be advantageous.
Recently, we have applied the mRNA subtraction technique and identified the gene encoding valosin-containing protein (VCP; also known as p97) as being associated with metastasis of a murine osteosarcoma cell line (6)
. VCP, a member of the "ATPases associated with various cellular activities" superfamily, plays a key role in the ubiquitin-dependent proteasome degradation pathway (7)
. In particular, VCP inhibits apoptosis after stimulation with cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor via degradation of inhibitor
B
, an inhibitor of nuclear factor-
B (NF-
B; Ref. 7
). Murine osteosarcoma cells transfected with the VCP gene exhibited constant activation of NF-
B, rapid degradation of phosphorylated-inhibitor
B
, decreased apoptosis rates after tumor necrosis factor
stimulation, and increased metastatic potential (6)
. These results indicated the importance of VCP in the metastatic process in experimental models.
In the present study, we analyzed the expression level of VCP in human colorectal carcinomas by immunohistochemistry and assessed its correlation with tumor recurrence and prognosis.
| PATIENTS AND METHODS |
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All patients received standardized follow-up examinations, including laboratory tests such as routine blood count and serum carcinoembryonic antigen level at 16-month intervals, chest X-ray, liver ultrasound, computerized tomographic scan of the abdomen and pelvis at 6-month intervals, and endoscopic colonoscopy at 1-year intervals during the first 3 postoperative years and at 612-month intervals thereafter. Postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy with fluorouracil was performed on all of the stage III and IV patients but was not applied to stage I and II patients. The mean observation time for survivors was 63.8 months.
Immunohistochemical Analysis.
Immunohistochemistry was performed using paraffin-embedded tissue sections with an immunoperoxidase procedure (avidin-biotin complex method). Briefly, antigen retrieval was performed by heating the deparaffinized rehydrated sections in 10 mM citrate buffer for 5 min. Mouse monoclonal anti-VCP (p97) antibody (PROGEN Biotechnik, Heidelberg, Germany) was used as the primary antibody at a final dilution of 1:3000. Sections were lightly counterstained using methylgreen. For negative controls, nonimmunized mouse IgG (Vector Laboratories, Burlingame, CA) was used as the primary antibody. Stained sections were evaluated in a blinded manner without prior knowledge of the clinicopathological features of patients. Staining intensity in the cytoplasm of tumor cells was categorized as follows: weaker-to-equal (low VCP expression) or stronger (high expression) than that in noncancerous colonic mucosa, which was determined as the positive control. Cases showing combined high- and low-intensity staining in different areas of the tumors were classified into the high-intensity group. Immunohistochemical analysis for VCP expression was performed in 129 primary colorectal carcinomas together with 10 cases of its metastatic foci in the liver and 8 cases of colorectal adenomas resected by polypectomy.
Statistical Analysis.
Statistical analyses were performed using JMP software (SAS Institute, Inc., Cary, NC). The
2 test and Fishers exact probability test were used to analyze the correlation between VCP expression on immunohistochemistry and clinicopathological features. Kaplan-Meyer methods with the log-rank test were used to calculate overall survival rates and differences in survival curves (8)
. Coxs proportional hazards regression model with stepwise analysis was used to analyze the independent prognostic factors (9)
. Ps of <0.05 were considered as statistically significant.
| RESULTS |
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| DISCUSSION |
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In the present study, VCP expression level was examined by immunohistochemical analysis. Clear correlation in VCP expression between mRNA and protein level has been reported by us (13) in cases with hepatocellular carcinomas and Muller et al. (14) in murine nontumoral tissue using reverse transcription-PCR and immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry, respectively, indicating the reliability of immunohistochemistry for evaluation of VCP expression.
All 8 cases of colorectal adenoma had low VCP expression levels, and all 10 hepatic metastatic foci had high expression levels. Of the colorectal adenocarcinomas, 41 of 129 expressed low VCP levels, and the remaining 88 expressed high levels of VCP. The accumulation of sequential mutations in genes such as adenomatous polyposis coli, K-ras, and p53 has been known to be the main process of colorectal tumorigenesis (15) . However, genes involved in the acquisition of metastatic potential have not yet been clarified. Our demonstration of high VCP expression in all hepatic metastatic foci, about two-thirds of primary colorectal carcinomas, and no benign adenomas indicates that modulated expression of VCP is a late event in tumorigenesis and might be crucial in the acquisition of metastatic potential.
The mechanism underlying increased VCP expression in colorectal adenocarcinomas compared with their nontumoral counterparts is not clear at present. The nucleotide sequence of the 5'-flanking region of VCP contains consensus-binding sites for several transcriptional activators, suggesting complex regulation of VCP expression (14) . VCP is a target gene of Pim-1, a proto-oncogene serine/threonine-protein kinase (16) Therefore, expression of VCP could be regulated by several oncogenes or antioncogenes, whereas influences of key genes in colorectal carcinogenesis such as p53 and K-ras have not been elucidated. Enhanced VCP expression was demonstrated in a metastatic variant of a murine melanoma cell line (17) . These findings suggest that VCP expression is under precise control but that it increases in cancer cells in association with acquisition of metastatic potential. Additional investigations are required to elucidate the mechanism of modulation of VCP expression in malignant tumors.
Among the clinicopathological factors examined, a significant correlation was observed between VCP expression and depth of invasion, presence or absence of venous invasion, and distant metastasis. These findings could be consistent with those of our previous in vitro study in which VCP overexpression is correlated with the increased metastatic potential of tumor cells in an experimental metastasis model (6)
. Because successful tumor formation in the circulation and distant organs require activation of antiapoptotic pathways, including NF-
B signaling (18)
, VCP may has an antiapoptotic effect via up-regulation of NF-
B signaling by influencing the degradation process of cytoplasmic phosphorylated inhibitor
B
, an inhibitor of NF-
B, as shown in our previous in vitro study (6)
. Although our preliminary results with immunohistochemical detection of NF-
B expression failed to show the significant difference in staining intensity between colorectal carcinoma with high and low VCP expression, colon cancer cells with high metastatic potential could have the increased antiapoptotic potential in association with up-regulated NF-
B and down-regulated inhibitor
B
expression (19)
. Additional studies should be needed to clarify the mechanism behind the present findings.
In this study, univariate and multivariate analyses revealed the VCP expression level to be an independent prognosticator for recurrence of colorectal carcinoma and patient survival. In addition, the VCP level proved to be a prognosticator for recurrence of the disease in lymph node-positive patients (stage III) as well as node-negative patients (stage II): 5-year disease-free survival rate in patients with low and high VCP expression was 100 and 72.8% at stage II and 100 and 48.4% at stage III, respectively. Although lymph node metastasis is an indicator of poor prognosis of patients with colorectal carcinomas, heterogeneity of the prognosis among patients with positive lymph nodes has been a problem (20) . The present study has clearly demonstrated the usefulness of VCP expression in predicting distant metastasis in node-positive patients.
In conclusion, VCP expression as determined by immunohistochemistry could be used as a new prognosticator for colorectal carcinomas. Stratification of colorectal carcinoma patients based on the stage of disease and VCP expression levels should be a useful tool for predicting tumor recurrence and patient prognosis. This system might represent a novel way to explore effective treatment modalities for colorectal carcinoma.
| FOOTNOTES |
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The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
Requests for reprints: Shoji Nakamori, Department of Surgery and Clinical Oncology, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, 2-2 Yamadaoka, Suita Osaka 565-0871, Japan. Phone: 81-6-6879-3251; Fax: 81-6-6879-3259; E-mail: nakamori{at}surg2.med.osaka-u.ac.jp
Received 12/20/02; revised 9/30/03; accepted 10/10/03.
| REFERENCES |
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B signaling pathway, which is important for metastasis of osteosarcoma cell line. Jpn. J. Cancer Res., 93: 296-304, 2002.[CrossRef][Medline]
B
and 26 S proteasome, in ubiquitin-proteasome-mediated degradation of I
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B: control of oncogenesis and cancer therapy resistance. Biochim. Biophys. Acta, 1470: M55-M62, 2000.[Medline]
B inhibitors induce adhesion-dependent colon cancer apoptosis: implications for metastasis. Cancer Res., 62: 6870-6878, 2002.This article has been cited by other articles:
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S. Yamamoto, Y. Tomita, T. Uruno, Y. Hoshida, Y. Qiu, N. Iizuka, I. Nakamichi, A. Miyauchi, and K. Aozasa Increased Expression of Valosin-Containing Protein (p97) Is Correlated With Disease Recurrence in Follicular Thyroid Cancer Ann. Surg. Oncol., November 1, 2005; 12(11): 925 - 934. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
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