Increased EHD1 in non-small cell lung cancer predicts poor survival

One of the main challenges of lung cancer research is identifying patients at high risk for recurrence after surgical resection. We evaluated the prognostic power of four proteins in the endocytic pathway in 114 non-small cell lung cancer patients (NSCLC).

We tested the four proteins (epidermal growth factor receptor [EGFR], RAB11FIP3, EHD1, and caveolin-1), critical nodes in the endocytosis/recycling pathway, by immunohistochemistry in paraffin sections from 114 non-small cell lung cancer patients. We analyzed the correlation between our target proteins and clinical variables. Within these variables, an overall survival (OS) prediction model was constructed using Cox proportional hazard regression.

EHD1 expression correlated with gender (P = 0.001), histology type (P < 0.001), and EGFR expression (P = 0.008), but not with any of the other clinical parameters. Statistical correlation analysis showed that the expression of EHD1 positively correlated with high level of EGFR (P < 0.001) and RAB11FIP3 (P < 0.001), and the expression of caveolin-1 positively correlated with high level of EGFR (P < 0.001) in the NSCLC samples. EHD1 expression was an OS prognostic factor for all of the patients (P = 0.009), for the group of adjuvant chemotherapy-treated patients (P = 0.006), and for the EGFR positive patients (P = 0.034).

We identified EHD1 as a strong prognostic predictive factor in NSCLC. The expression level of EHD1 would potentially be useful in developing customized strategies for managing lung cancer, such as the selection of patients eligible for chemotherapy.