Correlation of Gankyrin oncoprotein overexpression with histopathological grade in prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer among men worldwide. Identifying new prognostic and predictive biomarkers will help stratification of prostate cancer patients for a better treatment. Gankyrin is a novel oncoprotein which regulates cell cycle and protein degradation. Gankyrin overexpression correlated with the malignant phenotypes and promotes the tumorigenicity and metastasis in many cancers. However, there are not any reports on the role of Gankyrin in prostate cancer. Therefore, this study was designed to investigate the expression of Gankyrin in prostate cancer and analyze its correlation with some clinicopathological characteristics. We characterized the expression of gankyrin in fifty five prostate cancer specimens and twenty non-cancerous tissues by immunohistochemical staining and the results were correlated with clinical characteristics and pathological parameters.Results showed that Gankyrin was expressed in 41 of 55 (74%) prostate cancer patients and its expression was significantly higher than corresponding adjacent normal tissues (p<0.001). Gankyrin overexpression was significantly correlated with histopathological tumor grade, Gleason score and tumor differentiation (P=0.002). These findings showed that Gankyrin is mainly overexpressed in high grade prostate tumors so it may have a significant role in prostate cancer progress and it May serve as a useful biomarker for the identification of aggressive prostate cancers.