"Wnt/β-Catenin in GIST"-Letter

In an article published on September, 2017, in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, Zeng and colleagues showed that the WNT/β-catenin oncogenic pathway was activated in a subset of human gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) and that inhibiting its signaling alone or in combination with imatinib has antitumor efficacy in vitro and in vivo in imatinib-sensitive and resistant preclinical models. However, they concluded that "more investigation is needed to correlate β-catenin activation with clinicopathologic features in GIST clinical samples." Here, we examined the activation score of the β-catenin pathway in 160 clinically annotated clinical samples of operated primary GISTs. We showed that the β-catenin activation score, assessed as continuous variable, was heterogeneous across samples. Higher score was associated with certain prognostic clinicopathologic characteristics, including mutational status, tumor size, and AFIP classification, and even more importantly, with more postoperative relapses in uni- and multivariate analyses. Such unfavorable independent prognostic value of β-catenin activation reinforces the potential therapeutic value of this new target in GIST and nicely complements Zeng's study. Mol Cancer Ther; 17(1); 327-8. ©2018 AACR.