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

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 12; no. 2; p. e0171269
• Main Authors: Tai, Chun-San, Lin, Yan-Ren, Teng, Tsung-Han, Lin, Ping-Yi, Tu, Siang-Jyun, Chou, Chih-Hung, Huang, Ya-Rong, Huang, Wei-Chih, Weng, Shun-Long, Huang, Hsien-Da, Chen, Yao-Li, Chen, Wen Liang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 03.02.2017; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Aged; Bioengineering; Bioinformatics; Biology; Biology and Life Sciences; Biomarkers, Tumor; Biopsy; Cancer; Carcinoma, Hepatocellular - genetics; Carcinoma, Hepatocellular - mortality; Carcinoma, Hepatocellular - pathology; Colorectal cancer; Correlation; Development and progression; Diagnostic systems; Differentiation; Female; Gene Expression; Gene Expression Profiling; Genetic aspects; Genomes; Haptoglobin; Haptoglobins - genetics; Haptoglobins - metabolism; Hepatocellular carcinoma; Hepatology; High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; Hospitals; Humans; Immunohistochemistry; Liver cancer; Liver Neoplasms - genetics; Liver Neoplasms - mortality; Liver Neoplasms - pathology; Lung cancer; Male; Medical prognosis; Medicine; Medicine and Health Sciences; Metastasis; Middle Aged; Neoplasm Grading; Neoplasm Staging; Ovarian cancer; Pancreatic cancer; Patient outcomes; Patients; Prognosis; Proteins; Research and Analysis Methods; Ribonucleic acid; RNA; Solid tumors; Stem cells; Survival; Tissues; Transplants & implants; Tumors; Variance analysis; Taiwan
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171269

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.