Overexpression of Keratin17 is Associated With Prognosis of Oral Cancer in the Chinese Population

Abstract

Background: Oral cancer represents an common cancer among head and neck malignancies. The early metastasis contributes the poor prognosis of this disease. Keratin (KRT) family has ever been found to be involved in some crucial biological processes in normal cells and human cancer cells. As a member of this family, keratin 17 (KRT17) has been studied in some different cancers. In the present study, we aimed at assess the prognostic value of KRT17 in patients with oral cancer.Methods: Expression of KRT17 in 135 paired oral cancer tissues and noncancerous tissues was estimated by using quantitative Real-Time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR). The prognostic value of KRT17 was assessed with Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and multivariate Cox regression analysis.Results: Upregulated expression of KRT17 was detected in oral cancer tissues compared with the matched normal tissues (P<0.001). The expression of KRT17 was found associated with lymph node metastasis (P=0.025) and clinical stage (P=0.005). The Kaplan-Meier survival curves showed that the patients with high KRT17 expression possessed worse overall survival than those with low level cases (log-rank P=0.000). From the data of Cox analysis, we considered the KRT17 expression was an independent prognostic biomarker in oral cancer patients with HR of 2.489, 95% CI of 1.333-4.648 and P of 0.004.Conclusion: In summary, the expression of KRT17 was found upregulated in oral cancer tissue specimens and it was proved to serve as an independent prognostic biomarker in patients with oral cancer.

Emerging Prognostic and Predictive Significance of Stress Keratin 17 in HPV-Associated and Non HPV-Associated Human Cancers: A Scoping Review

“…Initial studies evaluating K17 at the transcriptome level were performed in oral HNSCC [38] (2017) and TNBC [29] (2017). To date, HNSCC [15,24,[38][39][40][41][42], TNBC [28,29,[43][44][45][46][47], and pancreatic cancer [31,35,[48][49][50][51] are the most studied cancer types (n = 7). K17 was a significant prognostic variable in 16/17 (94.1%) investigated cancer types and 43/56 (76.8%) studies (Table 2).…”

“…In HPV-associated cancers, seven (12.5%) studies investigated the prognostic role of K17 in HNSCC [24,[38][39][40][41][42]52] and three (5.4%) studies in cervical SCC [22,34,53]. One study (1.8%) in HNSCC investigated both the prognostic and predictive role [15].…”

“…The details of biomarker assessment methodologies are presented in Supplemental Table S2. Studies investigating K17 at the transcriptome level (n = 24) have found K17 to hold negative prognostic value in most cancer entities (endometrial [30,71], esophageal [57], gastric [72], HNSCC [38,42,52], lung cancer [73,74], melanoma [75,76], pancreatic adenocarcinoma [50,51], and renal cell carcinoma [77]). In TNBC, a negative correlation between K17 RNA expression and outcome was found only in a subgroup of patients with invasive ductal carcinoma with large tumors and advanced stage [29].…”

“…Thirteen studies (56.5%) were based on data derived from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) [30,31,49,50,57,71,71,73,75,76,80]. Five studies (21.7%) generated their own transcriptome data [38,42,51,52,79]. Thirteen studies reported an effect size in their findings [30,31,42,50,57,65,71,72,75,[78][79][80][81].…”

“…Five studies (21.7%) generated their own transcriptome data [38,42,51,52,79]. Thirteen studies reported an effect size in their findings [30,31,42,50,57,65,71,72,75,[78][79][80][81].…”