A new combined prognostic model involving SLC44A4 improves the predictive ability for colorectal cancer patients
Panyuan Li1, Xiaoqing Cheng1, Yanchuang Wu1
1Department of Pathology, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Background:
Colorectal cancer (CRC) poses a severe threat to public health, as evidenced by its increasing incidence, high mortality rate, and the common occurrence of late diagnosis. Prognosis prediction is crucial for improving therapeutic strategies and achieving better clinical outcomes in patients with CRC. Solute carrier family 44 member 4 (SLC44A4) is a prognostic marker in head and neck cancer, renal cancer, and urothelial cancer. However, its prognostic value in CRC has not been evaluated. This study aims to evaluate the prognostic value of SLC44A4 in CRC.
Methods:
To determine the prognostic significance of SLC44A4 in CRC, we evaluated this gene using online databases. Next, we used tissue-microarray-based immunohistochemistry (IHC) to assess the expression level of SLC44A4 protein in CRC tissues and analyzed the prognostic significance of SLC44A4.
Results:
The online databases revealed that SLC44A4 was downregulated in CRC, and high expression of SLC44A4 was related to better overall survival (OS). Then, univariate and multivariate analyses of tissue-microarray-based IHC data showed that SLC44A4 was an independent favorable prognostic factor for OS. Furthermore, the new prognostic model, including pathological metastasis (pM) classification, absence or presence of relapse, and SLC44A4 expression level, had better predictive ability than the model without SLC44A4 expression level.
Conclusions:
SLC44A4 gene could be a biomarker to predict the prognosis of CRC patients. In addition, this new prognostic model that we proposed can improve the predictive ability to evaluate the prognosis and clinical outcomes of CRC patients.
