Affiliations: [a] Department of Clinical Biochemistry, Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Soura, Srinagar, Kashmir 190011, India | [b] Department of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Soura, Srinagar, Kashmir 190011, India | [c] Department of Biotechnology, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, Kashmir 190006, India
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Syed Mudassar, Department of Clinical Biochemistry, Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Soura, Srinagar, Kashmir 190011, India. Mobile phone: +91 0941 9016201; Tel.: +91 0194 2400064, 2206238; E-mail:syed.mudassar@skims.ac.in
Abstract: BACKGROUND: Hippo-LATS pathway is involved in regulating multiple
phenotypes. TAZ (transcriptional co-activator with PDZ-binding motif) is a
prominent proto-oncogene of this developmental pathway. Elevated TAZ
expression has been observed in many cancers including Non-Small Cell lung
cancer (NSCLC). OBJECTIVE: We elucidated the frequency of protein expression of
TAZ gene in NSCLC patients of our population along with its relationship with
clinicopathological parameters and determined its prognostic significance
concerning survival in patients with resected tumor. METHODS: We looked into the protein expression of TAZ gene in sixty
nine (n= 69) cases of NSCLC tissue and their corresponding normal lung tissue
samples by western blotting. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox
proportional hazards models were used to estimate the effect of TAZ protein
expressionon survival. RESULTS: Here, we found that TAZ protein expression was elevated in
49.27% (34 of 69) of NSCLC tissues as compared to only 13.04% (09 of
69) in normal lung tissues. TAZ protein expression was significantly
associated with smoking, positive lymph node status and vascular invasion
(P< 0.05). TAZ protein overexpression increased the hazards ratio by 2.6
(P= 0.005) on univariate analysis. Multivariable analysis confirmed that TAZ protein
overexpression along with age and lymph node metastasis increased the hazard
of death after adjusting for other clinicopathological factors (P< 0.05).
Importantly, TAZ protein overexpression was associated with short overall
survival and disease-free survival when compared with normal TAZ expression. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that TAZ is an independent
prognostic factor and plays an important role in NSCLC progression and may
serve as a novel therapeutic target of NSCLC.
Keywords: Lung cancer, survival, protein expression, hazard ratio, TAZ, NSCLC
