Serine/theonine kinase 4 is a potential biomarker for assessment of β‐catenin‐mediated colon cancer prognosis

Abstract

Colon cancer has highly incident rate in world, and the surgical therapy can cure early stage colorectal cancer patients. But the most difficult is to predict patients’ disease prognosis. STK4 is a one of the Hippo pathway component and was shown to have important role to control the organ size and cell to cell contact inhibition ability and was considered a potential tumor suppressor. However, little is known about the relationship between the expression of STK4 and patient survival. The aim of this study was to investigate prognostic value of STK4 in colon cancer. STK4 expression in normal and tumor tissues from 140 colon cancer patients was examined by immunohistochemistry. The relationship between STK4 expression and clinicopathological factors as well as patient survival was analyzed. Human colon cancer cell lines (H3347and DLD‐1) were used to analyze the effect of STK4 knockdown and overexpression on invasion/migration in vitro. IHC analysis showed STK4 was significantly downregulated in tumor tissues compared to their corresponding non‐tumor part (P< 0.01) and was significantly associated with tumor size (P = 0.003), distal metastasis (P = 0.03), disease recurrence and poor survival (P< 0.005). Univariate and multivariate analysis indicated loss of STK4 expression predicted significantly poor outcome. Knockdown of STK4 promoted, whereas overexpression of STK4 inhibited invasion and migration of human colon cancer cells in vitro. STK4 is a prognosis maker to predict patient survival in colorectal cancer. Loss of STK4 expressed in tissue is correlated with poor prognosis and survival.Support or Funding InformationThis research was supported by Academia Sinica [AS‐SUMMIT‐108].