INVESTIGADORES
RABINOVICH Gabriel Adrian
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Clinical relevance of galectin-1 expression in stage I and II Non Small Cell Lung Cancer patients
Autor/es:
MJ CARLINI; P ROITMAN; MG PALLOTTA; M. SALATINO; E BAL DE KIER JOFFÉ; L LAURIA; GA. RABINOVICH; L PURICELLI
Lugar:
,Denver Colorado
Reunión:
Congreso; American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); 2009
Institución organizadora:
American Association for Cancer Research (AACR
Resumen:
Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality, being its incidence in women steadily increased in the last years. Although early-stage Non Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) patients have a relative favorable prognosis, the risk of bad outcome remains substantial, being about 20% for Stage I patients and 30% for Stage II patients. So, the detection of tumoral markers has a meaningful clinical relevance.  Galectin-1 (Gal-1) an evolutionarily-conserved glycan-binding protein, can modulate tumor progression by mediating cell-cell and cell-extracellular matrix interactions, as well as angiogenesis and tumor immune-escape. Previous works reported the expression of Gal-1 in lung cancer, although its clinical significance is still uncertain. The aim of the present work was to assess the clinico-pathological role and prognostic significance of Gal-1 in NSCLC.  Gal-1 expression was determined by immunohistochemistry in 66 tissue samples from a cohort of tumors from Stage I and II NSCLC patients (SI = 81.3%, SII = 18.8%). The percentage of immunopositive tumor cells and tumor stroma was recorded, as well as the presence of blood vessels with positively stained endothelium in the tumor area and the peritumoral “normal” stroma. We correlated Gal-1 expression with the tumor histopathology, the patient´s clinical status at diagnosis and overall survival. Prognostic evaluation was analyzed with the Long Rank test and the multivariate Cox proportional hazard model. Non-tumoral parenchyma was always negative for Gal-1. In contrast with its normal counterpart, tumor cells presented different degrees of specific staining, being 41/66 (62.1%) cases positive in more than 10% of the cells. These tumors were classified as positive for further analysis. Tumor stroma showed a high positivity for Gal-1, being only 8/66 (12.1%) samples unable to express the protein. Regarding endothelial cells in the vasculature, 24/66 (36.4%) cases in the tumor zone, and 13/58 (22.4%) cases in the non-tumoral area showed immunopositivity (p< 0.05). No association was found between the number of tumoral cells expressing Gal-1 and clinical pathological parameters, including age, T, N, histopathology and smoking habit. Survival analysis by Kaplan Meier method did not show any significant difference for Gal-1 expression. However, when stratifying patients based on their clinical-pathological features, we found that Gal-1 expression in tumor cells was associated with a worse prognosis in patients with small size tumors (T1) (p<0.05). Nevertheless, the multivariate study indicated that Gal-1 expression was influenced by other clinical pathological parameters.In conclusion, our study indicated that Gal-1 is overexpressed in tumors from stage I and II NSCLC patients suggesting that it should be considered a factor involved in the progression of human lung cancer. These findings encourage the evaluation of a larger cohort of NSCLC