Abstract
BACKGROUND: OLC1 (overexpressed in lung cancer 1), screened out and cloned in our previous research, is a new gene associated with lung cancer. It is highly expressed in lung cancer and many other malignant tumors, and is associated with poor prognosis of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, ovarian cancer, breast cancer and colorectal cancer. The aim of this research was to detect the expression level of OLC1 in the tumor tissues of lung adenocarcinoma (ADC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and explore its relationship with the prognosis of lung cancer patients. METHODS: Lung cancer tissues of 108 SCC and 90 ADC was dealed with immunohistochemical staining to detect the expression level of OLC1. The relationship between the expression level of OLC1 and clinical parameters and prognosis was analyzed. RESULTS: The rate of high expression of OLC1 staining in ADC was significantly higher than that in SCC (87.5% vs 55.3%, P<0.001). The overexpression of OLC1 in tumor tissues did not have a significant relationship with the prognosis of patients with ADC, but it was related with a poor prognosis of SCC patients as the univariate analysis showed. However the multivariate regression analysis showed that correlation between the overexpression of OLC1 and poor prognosis of SCC patients did not have a statistical significance (P=0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The expression of OLC1 in ADC might be higher than that in SCC. A higher score of OLC1 staining in tumor tissue was associated with a poorer prognosis of patients with SCC, but could not be an independent predictor for a shorter overall survival in patients with SCC.