Human leukocyte antigen‐G expression is associated with a poor prognosis in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Abstract

Human leukocyte antigen (HLA)‐G inhibits functions of immune component cells and promotes malignant cells evading from antitumor immunity. We investigated the clinical relevance of HLA‐G expression in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). In our study, HLA‐G expression in 79 primary ESCC lesions and corresponding adjacent normal tissues were analyzed with immunohistochemistry. Soluble HLA‐G (sHLA‐G) in plasma was detected with enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in 41 ESCC patients (including 19 case‐matched lesions and plasma samples) and in 153 normal healthy controls. HLA‐G expression was observed in 65.8% (52/79) of the ESCC lesions but not in adjacent normal esophageal tissues. HLA‐G expression was more frequently observed in patients with advanced disease stage (III/IV vs. I/II, p = 0.01). Patients with HLA‐G expression had a significantly worse survival, and HLA‐G could be an independent prognostic factor. sHLA‐G levels in plasma were significantly increased in patients compared to normal controls (median: 152.4 U/ml vs. 8.9 U/ml, p < 0.001). The area under receiver‐operating characteristic (ROC) curve for sHLA‐G in plasma was 0.992. However, no significant correlation was found between sHLA‐G in plasma and clinical parameters studied. In conclusion, our findings indicated that HLA‐G expression in ESCC is associated with poor survival and could be a prognostic indicator. Furthermore, increased levels of sHLA‐G in plasma might be a useful preoperative biomarker for diagnosis.

Human leukocyte antigen-G (HLA-G) expression in cervical cancer lesions is associated with disease progression

“…In hepatocellular carcinoma, HLA-G expression was found to be strongly correlated to advanced disease stage, and more frequently observed in elder patients [17]. Similar correlation was also observed in non-small cell lung cancer [18,19], gastric carcinomas [20], colorectal cancer [21] and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients [22,23] that lesion HLA-G expression was strongly correlated to disease stage and poor prognosis and that HLA-G was an independent prognostic factor.…”

Importance of HLA-G expression and tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in molecular subtypes of breast cancer

“…Previously, it was demonstrated that aberrant expression of HLA-G was associated with poor clinical outcomes in various types of carcinoma [16,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] including breast cancer [14,31]. Therefore, our current findings suggests that HLA-G is may be an unfavorable prognostic predictor among breast cancer molecular subtypes since patients with non-luminal subtypes have a poorer prognosis than the luminal subtypes [2,3].…”

Human Leukocyte Antigen-G (HLA-G) Expression in Cancers: Roles in Immune Evasion, Metastasis and Target for Therapy

“…However, more studies on the complete HLA-G gene and its linkage disequilibrium with other genes and on HLA-G expression at both the tumor site and plasma in a specific microenvironment are required to consolidate these findings. carcinoma (69,70), esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (71)(72)(73)(74), gastric cancer (75)(76)(77), glioblastoma (78), hepatocellular carcinoma (79)(80)(81), lung cancer (82)(83)(84), nasopharyngeal carcinoma (85), oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (86), ovarian cancer (87-89), pancreatic adenocarcinoma (90), thyroid carcinoma (91,92). These data were summarized in Table 1.…”