Clinical significance of Wilm tumor gene(WT1) expression in breast cancer / 肿瘤研究与临床

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the clinical significance of Wilm tumor gene (WT1) expression in breast cancer. Methods Real-time quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RQ-RT-PCR) method was established for detecting WT1 and GAPDH mRNA expression levels in 110 cases of various breast tumor and the corresponding adjacent normal breast tissue. Normalized WT1 expression level (WT1_N)was determined as a ratio between WT1 and GAPDH for each case. The tumor tissue WT1_N over the normaltissue WT1_N of the same case was calculated as T/N_(WT1) ratio, and T/N_(WT1) value was analyzed with the clinicalpathological parameters. Results The WT1_N expression levels of the 102 breast cancer tissues were significantly higher than those of the adjacent normal breast tissues, with the median WT1_N of 2.38 (ranged from 0.12 to 112.3) and 0.81 (ranged from 0.03 to 11.65) for each (P <0.01), but there were no statistical differences between the WT1_N of 8 benign breast tumors and the nearing normal tissues, with the median WT1_N of 0.46 (ranged from 0.16 to 5.04) and 0.53 (ranged from 0.14 to 4.94) for each. Furthermore the WT1_Nas well as the T/N_(WT1) ratio of the malignant breast cancer tissues were significantly higher than those of the benign tumor tissues, with the median T/N_(WT1) value of 2.54 (ranged from 0.28 to 172.88) and 1.17 (ranged from 0.09 to 2.63) for each. Non-parameter correlation analysis showed that the T/N_(WT1) in breast cancers were of no relevance to lymph node metastasis, clinical-pathological types, estrogen receptor and progestone receptor status, but positively correlated with the expression level of IL-8 gene which calculated with T/N IL-8(r =0.723, P <0.01). Conclusion The WT1 gene is highly expressed in breast cancer which suggests that WT1 level assessed by RQ-RT-PCR could be a novel marker of disease progression and poor prognosis.