BC200 LncRNA a potential predictive marker of poor prognosis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients.

OBJECTIVE: To explore the expression and prognosis significance of BC200 in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) patients who received radical resection. METHODS: We used quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction to detect the expression level of BC200 in cancer tissue and paired adjacent normal tissue samples from 70 ESCC patients who received radical surgical resection and analyzed the correlation of the relative expression level of BC200 with clinical-pathological features and prognosis. RESULTS: We found that the relative expression of BC200 was significantly higher in ESCC tissues compared with adjacent normal tissue samples (P=0.023). But the expression of BC200 were not related to clinical-pathological features, such as age, TNM stages, and histological grade (P>0.05). Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that high expression levels of BC200 were correlated with poor prognosis in ESCC patients. Patients with a high level of BC200 had a shorter disease-free survival and overall survival than those with low BC200 expression (P=0.034 and P=0.031, respectively). On multivariate analysis, the hazard ratio (HR) of BC200 expression was 2.17 (95% confidence interval [CI]=1.12-4.19, P=0.022) for disease-free survival and 2.24 (95% CI=1.12-4.49, P=0.023) for overall survival. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that high expression of BC200 reflects poor prognosis and could serve as a novel predictive marker for ESCC patients who received radical resection.

N-cadherin participated in invasion and metastasis of human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma via taking part in the formation of vasculogenic mimicry.

Vasculogenic mimicry (VM) refers to the unique ability of highly aggressive tumor cells to mimic the pattern of embryonic vasculogenic networks, and the presence of VM correlates to an increased risk of metastasis and poor clinical outcome of cancers. Several key molecules, including N-cadherin, have been implicated in VM. However, the role of N-cadherin in the formation of VM in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) had not been elucidated. In this study, firstly we aimed to identify VM patterns in ESCC tissues and to explore their clinical significance. VM was present in 12 out of 56 samples, and ESCC with lymph node metastasis had a higher incidence of VM than that without lymph node metastasis. More importantly, VM channels were associated with the expression of N-cadherin in ESCC tissues. In order to further explore the role of N-cadherin in VM formation and invasion and metastasis in ESCC, secondly, we silenced the expression of N-cadherin with small hairpin RNA in ESCC cell line KYSE-70; herein, we showed that KYSE-70 cells with N-cadherin silencing lost not only the capacity to form tube-like structures on collagen (VM) but also the invasion, metastasis and proliferation ability in KYSE-70 cells in vitro. Taken together, antivascular therapies targeting tumor cell VM may be an effective approach to the treatment of patients with highly metastatic ESCC.

Chemoradiotherapy followed by surgery could improve the efficacy of treatments in patients with resectable esophageal carcinoma.

BACKGROUND: The effectiveness of chemoradiotherapy followed by surgery (CRTS) in patients with resectable esophageal carcinoma remains controversial. We performed a systematic review of the literature with meta-analysis. METHODS: Electronic databases were used to identify published studies between January 1992 and April 2012. Pooled relative risk (RR) with 95% confidence interval (95% CI) was utilized to estimate the strength of the association between CRTS and surgery alone (SA) survival of the resectable esophageal carcinoma patients. Heterogeneity and publication bias were also assessed in the present study. RESULTS: The final analysis of 2755 resectable esophageal carcinoma cases from 21 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are presented. Compared to the SA group, the 1, 3- and 5-year survival rates were significantly higher in the CRTS group (all P < 0.05); the 3- and 5-year survival rates for the Eastern patients, Western patients, patients undergoing concurrent chemoradiotherapy, patients with squamous cell carcinoma, patients undergoing High-dose radiotherapy (≥ 40 Gy), and patients given either "cisplatin + Fluorouracil" or "cisplatin + paclitaxel" chemotherapy were significantly higher in the CRTS group (all P < 0.05). There were no statistical significances in the 3- and 5-year survival rates for patients undergoing sequential chemoradiotherapy or patients with adenocarcinoma between the two groups (all P > 0.05). Compared to the RCTS group, the surgery rate in the SA group was higher (P < 0.05), while the CRTS group had significantly higher radical resection rate, R0 resection rate and lower postoperative local recurrence rate (all P < 0.05). The differences in postoperative complication incidence, post-operative distant metastasis and postoperative mortality rate were not statistically significant between the two groups (all P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: CRTS can significantly improve the survival and surgical conditions of patients with resectable esophageal carcinoma.