Expression and prognostic significance of CCL11/CCR3 in glioblastoma

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most lethal primary nervous system cancer, but due to its rarity and complexity, its pathogenesis is poorly understood. To identify potential tumorigenic factors in GBM, we screened antibody-based cytokine arrays and found that CCL11 was upregulated. We then demonstrated in vitro that both CCL11 and its receptor, CCR3, were overexpressed and promoted the proliferation, migration and invasion of cancer cells. To examine the clinical significance of CCL11/CCR3, 458 GBM samples were divided into a training cohort with 225 cases and a test cohort containing 233 cases. In the training set, immunohistochemical analysis showed overexpression of CCL11 and CCR3 were correlated with unfavorable overall survival (OS). We further developed a prognostic classifier combining CCL11 and CCR3 expression and Karnofsky performance status (KPS) for predicting one-year survival in GBM patients. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis demonstrated that this predictor achieved 90.7% sensitivity and 73.4% specificity. These results were validated with the test sample set. Our findings suggest that CCL11-CCR3 binding is involved in the progression of GBM and may prompt a novel therapeutic approach. In addition, CCL11 and CCR3 expression, combined with KPS, may be used as an accurate predictor of one-year survival in GBM patients.