CA9 and CHRNB1 were correlated with perineural invasion in Taiwanese colorectal cancer patients

Abstract

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a significant public health problem worldwide. The recent identification of genes overexpressed in CRC, combined with advances in molecular biology techniques, provides opportunities to establish more sensitive, specific, and cost-effective ways of identifying local recurrence or metastasis. This study explored the overexpression of prognosis-associated mRNAs in human CRC by using a well-established enzymatic chip array platform. An analysis of 15 CRC cancer tissue specimens and their normal adjacent tissues revealed that 10 genes—CA9, CD55, CHRNB1, CK20, ELAVL4, hTERT, KCTD2, MUC1, PSG2, TMPO—were upregulated in CRC cancer tissue by microarray and bioinformatics analysis. A gene chip including 10 candidate genes was constructed to investigate the circulating tumor cells in blood specimens of 156 CRC patients and further validated by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. The correlations between clinicopathologic features and the gene expression of 10 candidate genes are compared using the Chi-square test. Results from this study demonstrated that the overexpression of CA9 and CHRNB1 genes correlated with perineural invasion (both p < 0.05). The CHRNB1 overexpression may affect the opening of an ion-conducting channel across the plasma membrane of tumor cells. The CHRNB1 gene may be a suitable new marker to predict disease prognosis for Taiwanese patients with CRC.