Correlation of Osteopontin Protein Expression and Pathological Stage across a Wide Variety of Tumor Histologies

Abstract

Results: High cytoplasmic OPN staining was observed in 100% of gastric carcinomas, 85% of colorectal carcinomas, 82% of transitional cell carcinomas of the renal pelvis, 81% of pancreatic carcinomas, 72% of renal cell carcinomas, 71% of lung and endometrial carcinomas, 70% of esophageal carcinomas, 58% of squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck, and 59% of ovarian carcinomas. Although OPN expression was identified in a good number of bladder, prostate, and brain tumors, the majority of 6 skin cancers, 11 of 14 salivary gland cancers, 2 thyroid carcinomas, and 23 of 26 breast cancers revealed low OPN positivity or were negative. When considering all sites, OPN expression significantly correlated with tumor stage (Spearman's correlation coefficient, P ‫؍‬ 0.0002). OPN score and stage were also significantly correlated for specific cancer sites including bladder (P ‫؍‬ 0.01), colon (P ‫؍‬ 0.004), kidney (P ‫؍‬ 0.0001), larynx (P ‫؍‬ 0.035), mouth (P ‫؍‬ 0.046), and salivary gland (P ‫؍‬ 0.011).Conclusions: This study reports the broad distribution of OPN in human tumors from different body sites, suggesting involvement of this protein in tumor formation. The strong correlation between pathological stage and OPN across multiple tumor types suggests a role for OPN in tumor progression.

Expression of Osteopontin in oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma

“…The expression of Osteopontin was observed in 48% of tumours. This was consistent with previous immunohistochemical studies on other carcinomas in which Osteopontin expression was detected in 33.3 -70.0% (Ue et al, 1998;Zhang et al, 2001;Coppola et al, 2004).…”

“…Other molecules which share this domain include fibronectin, vitronectin and a variety of other extracellular proteins that bind members of the integrin family of cell surface receptors (Varner and Cheresh, 1996). The expression of Osteopontin has subsequently been demonstrated in a wide range of normal human tissue and body fluid such as osteoblasts, arterial smooth muscle cells, leukocytes, activated macrophages and T cells (Coppola et al, 2004), and epithelia of the gastro-intestinal tract (Brown et al, 1992;Brown et al, 1994). It is a multifunctional protein involved in cell adhesion and cell migration, and has been shown to play important roles in tumorigenesis, tumour invasion, metastasis and prognosis among patients with breast (Tuck et al, 1998), lung (Zhang et al, 2001;Donati et al, 2005), prostate (Thalmann et al, 1999), gastric (Ue et al, 1998) and colon cancer (Agrawal et al, 2002).…”

Ezrin expression is related to poor prognosis in FIGO stage I endometrioid carcinomas

“…14,15 However, the present study shows no impact on overall survival in endometrial carcinomas. In the contrary, there is a trend that 13 Like ezrin, osteopontin is not upregulated in endometrial carcinomas compared to normal tissue, and localization of osteopontin was within the cytoplasm of tumor cells. Extracellular osteopontin was of negligible amounts suggesting that stromal cells are not a significant source of osteopontin in endometrial carcinomas as it also has been shown in ovarian carcinomas.…”

“…12 Its expression has been investigated in a number of human tumors. 13 In gynecological tumors including breast and ovarian carcinomas, the overexpression of intracellular osteopontin was associated with poor prognosis. 14,15 In order to gain further insights into the importance of ezrin and osteopontin for progression of endometrial cancer, we correlated the expression of both proteins with clinicopathological parameters as well as patients survival in a large set of FIGO stage I endometrioid carcinomas comprising 164 samples.…”

Suppression of microRNA-96 expression inhibits the invasion of hepatocellular carcinoma cells

“…OPN has significant implications for increasing cell proliferation, enhancing migration and extracellular matrix invasion in vitro (21,22). OPN expression has been linked to tumor progression and metastasis in a variety of cancers and is associated with clinical stage, portending a poor prognosis (23)(24)(25)(26). As for HCC, OPN has been identified as the primary gene overexpressed in metastatic HCC (27) and is closely associated with HCC metastasis (28,29).…”