Serological evaluation of soluble CD44 in renal cancer

In this study, we examined the feasibility of using elevated serum CD44 concentration as an indicator in renal cancer. We performed enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays using 63 sera obtained from 47 patients with renal cancer and 16 healthy controls and evaluated the clinico-pathological parameters. The concentration of soluble CD44 standard (sCD44std), indicating the concentration of all circulating CD44 isoforms, was significantly higher in renal cancer patients than in normal individuals (745+/-170 ng/ml vs. 563+/-159 ng/ml, P=0.001). The concentration of soluble CD44 splice isoforms sharing exon v6 (sCD44v6) was also higher in the same patients (287+/-121 vs. 220+/-59, P=0.056). However, there were no correlations between the concentrations of sCD44std or sCD44v6 and clinico-pathological parameters such as grade, stage, histological type, tumor size and growth type. The ratio of sCD44std/sCD44v6 was higher in the rapid growth-type cancers than in the slow growth-type cancers (3.95+/-2.12 vs. 2.63+/-0.82, P = 0.014). These findings suggested that the serum concentration of unknown soluble CD44 isoforms not sharing exon v6, which are present in sCD44std, increases in patients with rapid growth-type cancers. These findings indicated that sCD44std and sCD44v6 are not useful indicators of tumor burden and metastasis in patients with renal cancer, but that an unknown sCD44 isoform(s) plays a role in the biological behavior of the rapid growth-type cancers.