Abstract
It is unclear as to whether Wilms’ tumor 1-associated protein (WTAP) promotes or suppresses breast cancer. This immunohistochemistry analysis explored levels of WTAP expression in 347 cases of breast cancer and analyzed the relationship between WTAP expression and the clinicopathological characteristics and prognosis of breast cancer patients. The rate of high WTAP expression was significantly higher in breast cancer tissue than in adjacent normal breast tissue (37.5% vs 0.0%; P < 0.001). WTAP expression was positively associated with tumor size and grade, and negatively associated with axillary lymph node metastasis, estrogen and progesterone receptor status. Rates of high WTAP expression were 66.1% in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) tissue and 31.3% in non-TNBC tissue. In multiple logistic regression analysis, independent predictors of WTAP expression in breast cancer included larger tumor size (odds ratio = 1.907; 95% confidence interval: 1.185–3.067; P = 0.008), lymph node metastasis (0.597; 0.373–0.956; P = 0.032) and TNBC status (3.735; 2.056–6.784; P < 0.001). No clear relationship was observed between patient prognosis and WTAP expression. We suggest that WTAP expression is upregulated in breast cancer and appears to both promote tumor growth and inhibit lymph node metastasis.
Highlights
It is unclear as to whether Wilms’ tumor 1-associated protein (WTAP) promotes or suppresses breast cancer
Our findings revealed significantly upregulated WTAP expression in breast cancer tissue compared with noncancerous breast tissue, in larger- versus smaller-sized tumors, and in higher-grade tumors
Higher-grade breast cancers are known to be more aggressive and to be associated with a poor prognosis[14]. These findings indicate that WTAP may be closely related to the occurrence of breast cancer, to highly invasive breast cancer and a poor prognosis
Summary
It is unclear as to whether Wilms’ tumor 1-associated protein (WTAP) promotes or suppresses breast cancer. In an analysis of three human cancer databases[11] that examined the relationship between WTAP expression and the prognosis of breast cancer patients, reduced WTAP expression was associated with poor survival in one database, and increased WTAP expression was associated with poor survival in another one database, while the results of the two microarrays in the third database are opposite, showing the same result of the first and second database above, respectively In another analysis, WTAP expression was reduced in breast cancer samples compared with normal tissue derived from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) d ata[12]. This study performed an immunohistochemistry (IHC) analysis of WTAP expression in breast cancer tissue samples obtained from 347 Chinese Han women, to clarify the expression of WTAP in breast cancer and its clinicopathological and prognostic significance
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