Autophagic Protein Beclin 1 Serves as an Independent Positive Prognostic Biomarker for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

作者：Weihua Zhou, Caifeng Yue, Jinyun Deng, Rong-Huan Hu, Jie Xu, Long Feng, Qiongyu Lan, Wenfeng Zhang, Dexiang Ji, Jianbing Wu, Quentin Liu, Anwen Liu · 发表于：PLoS ONE · 年份：2013 · DOI：10.1371/journal.pone.0080338 · 被引用次数：39 · 研究领域：Autophagy in Disease and Therapy、Cancer-related gene regulation、Studies on Chitinases and Chitosanases

Beclin 1, a key regulator of autophagy, has been found to be aberrantly expressed in a variety of human malignancies. Herein, we employed immunohistochemistry (IHC) to detect the protein expression of Beclin 1 in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and paired normal adjacent lung tissues, and analyzed its clinicopathological/prognostic significance in NSCLC. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was utilized to determine a cutoff point (>2 VS. ≤ 2) for Beclin 1 expression in a training set (n = 105). For validation, the ROC-derived cutoff value was subjected to analysis of the association of Beclin 1 with patients' clinical characteristics and outcome in a testing set (n = 111) and the overall patient cohort (n = 216). Our data showed that Beclin 1 was significantly lower in NSCLC tissues compared with the adjacent normal tissues, negatively associating with tumor recurrence rate (65.8% VS 32.3%; p < 0.001). In the testing set and the overall patient cohort, low expression of Beclin 1 showed significantly inferior overall survival (OS) (p < 0.001) and progression-free survival (PFS) (p < 0.001) compared to high expression of Beclin 1. In the testing set and the overall patient cohort, the median duration of OS for patients with high and low expression of Beclin 1 was 108 VS. 24.5 months (p < 0.001) and 108 VS. 28 months (p < 0.001), respectively. Furthermore, low expression of Beclin 1 was also a poor prognostic factor within each stage of NSCLC patients. Mult...