ABSTRACT
Purpose To investigate the expression of pFRK protein in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients and to explore its prognostic value.Methods The expression of p-FRK protein in tumor tissues and corresponding adjacent normal pulmonary tissues from 162 NSCLC patients was detected by immunohistochemistry of EnVision two-step.The correlation among p-FRK expression,age,gender,clinicopathologic features,pTNM stage and metastasis of NSCLC patients was also analyzed.whether p-FRK could be used as an independent predictor of prognosis for patients with NSCLC was further determined.Results The positive expression rate of p-FRK in NSCLC tissues (51.9％) was significantly higher than that of adjacent normal lung tissues (11.7％) (P =0.001).The expression of p-FRK in NSCLC was significantly correlated with histopathologic type,lymph node status and pTNM stage (P ＜0.05).Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that there was a negative correlation between p-FRK positive rate and postoperative overall survival (x2 =17.849,P ＜0.001).Multivariate analysis showed that p-FRK expression was an independent prognostic factor for overall survival of NSCLC patients (HR =0.496,95％ CI:0.295-0.836,P ＜ 0.05).Conclusion As a novel NSCLC biomarker,the expression of p-FRK may predict a poor prognosis in the patients with NSCLC.