Cytokeratin 8/18 expression indicates a poor prognosis in squamous cell carcinomas of the oral cavity

BACKGROUND: Intermediary filaments are involved in cell motility and cancer progression. In a variety of organs, the expression of distinct intermediary filaments are associated with patient prognosis. In this study, we seeked to define the prognostic potential of cytokeratin and vimentin expression patterns in squamous cell carcinomas (SCC's) of the oral cavity. METHODS: 308 patients with histologically proven and surgically treated squamous cell carcinomas of the oral cavity were investigated for the immunohistochemical expression of a variety of intermediary filaments including high- and low-molecular weight cytokeratins (Ck's), such as Ck 5/6, Ck 8/18, Ck 1, CK 10, Ck 14, Ck 19 and vimentin, using the tissue microarray technique. Correlations between clinical features and the expression of Cytokeratins and vimentin were evaluated statistically by Kaplan-Meier curves and multivariate Cox regression analysis. RESULTS: The expression of Ck 8/18 and Ck 19 were overall significantly correlated with a poor clinical prognosis (Ck 8/18 p = 0.04; Ck19 p < 0.01). These findings could also be reproduced for Ck 8/18 in primary nodal-negative SCC's and held true in multivariate-analysis. No significant correlation with patient prognosis could be found for the expression of the other cytokeratins and for vimentin. CONCLUSION: The expression of Ck 8/18 in SCC's of the oral cavity is an independent prognostic marker and indicates a decreased overall and progression free survival. These results provide an extended knowledge about the role of intermediary filament expression patterns in SCC's

Analyzing the basic principles of tissue microarray data measuring the cooperative phenomena of marker proteins in invasive breast cancer

Background: The analysis of a protein-expression pattern from tissue microarray (TMA) data will not immediately give an answer on synergistic or antagonistic effects between the observed proteins. But contrary to apparent first impression, it is possible to reveal those cooperative phenomena from TMA data. The data is (1) preserving a lot of the original physiological information content and (2) because of minor variances between the tumor samples, contains several related slightly different biological states. We present here a largely assumption-free combinatorial analysis, related to correlation networks but with much less arbitrary constraints. A strong focus was put on the analysis of the basic data to analyze how the cooperative phenomena might be imprinted in the TMA data structure. Results: The study design was based on two independent panels of 589 and 366 invasive breast cancer cases from different institutions, assembled on tissue microarrays. The combinatorial analysis generates an optimal rank ordering of protein-expression coherence. The outcome of the analysis corresponds to all the single observations scattered over several publications and integrates them in one context. This means all these scattered observations can also be deduced from one TMA experiment. A comprehensive statistical meta-analysis of the TMA data suggests the existence of a superposition of three basic coherence situations, and offers the opportunity to analyze these data properties with additional real-world data and synthetic data in more detail. Conclusion: The presented algorithm gives molecular pathologists a tool to extract dependency information from TMA data. Beyond this practical benefit, some light was shed on how dependency aspects might be imprinted into expression data. This will certainly foster the refinement of algorithms to reconstruct dependency networks. The implementation of the algorithm is at the moment not end-user suitable, but available on request

Overall survival of patient with nodal negative oral squamous cell carcinoma in dependence on Cytokeratin 8–18 expression calculated by the Kaplan-Meier method

<p><b>Copyright information:</b></p><p>Taken from "Cytokeratin 8/18 expression indicates a poor prognosis in squamous cell carcinomas of the oral cavity"</p><p>BMC Cancer 2006;6():10-10.</p><p>Published online 13 Jan 2006</p><p>PMCID:PMC1379654.</p><p>Copyright © 2006 Fillies et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.</p