Abstract
According to previous reports demonstrating the implication of insulin-like growth factor receptor (IGF-1R) signaling in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), in this study, the potential prognostic values of IGF-1R expression/activation were analyzed. The expression and activation of IGF-1R were evaluated in two tissue microarray (TMA) sets from NSCLC patients (N = 352 for TMA I, and N = 353 for TMA II). Alterations in IGF-1R protein or mRNA expression in NSCLC patients were evaluated using publicly available data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We found that membranous and cytoplasmic IGF-1R expressions were significantly associated with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) in both of the TMAs. Analysis of the TCGA data revealed increased mRNA levels in NSCLC patients, which was significantly associated with reductions in overall survival (OS) (median survival 26.51 vs. 47.77 months, P = 0.017) and disease-free survival (median survival 17.44 vs. 37.65 months, P = 0.045) only in NSCLC patients with adenocarcinoma (ADC). These data suggest that IGF-1R is activated in patients with NSCLC, particularly those with SCC. IGF-1R mRNA expression is a potential prognostic factor in patients with NSCLC, especially those with ADC. Further studies are warranted to investigate the prognostic value of IGF-1R in NSCLC patients.
Highlights
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths and results in more than one million deaths worldwide annually [1]
The cytoplasmic expression levels of pIGF-1R were significantly higher in patients with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) than ADC in both of the tissue microarray (TMA), while the membranous pIGF-1R expression level was significantly associated with SCC only in TMA II (Figs. 2A and 2B)
We performed an IHC analysis of the expression patterns of IGF-1R and pIGF-1R in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) using two large independent TMAs and publicly available query data known as the The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Research Network data accessible from the cBioPortal [15, 16]
Summary
Department of Internal Medicine, Seoul National University Boramae Medical Center, Seoul, Republic of Korea Keywords: non-small cell lung cancer, insulin-like growth factor-1 receptor, prognosis, tissue microarray This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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