Tissue microarray-based study of hepatocellular carcinoma validating SPIB as potential clinical prognostic marker

Currently, the prognostic significance of SPIB protein overexpression in human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is unclear. The aim of the present study was to investigate the level of SPIB expression in human HCC in order to determine possible correlations between SPIB expression and clinicopathological findings. The expression of SPIB proteins was detected using immunohistochemical staining in commercial multiple-tissue microarrays as a means of examining expression profiles in patients. Using online biomarker validation tool SurvExpress, we focused on the correlation between SPIB overexpression and survival as well as relapse-free survival (RFS). Results show that SPIB protein expression levels were significantly higher in colon, liver, and stomach tumors than in non-tumor tissues (p < 0.05). SPIB overexpression in patients with HCC was also significantly higher than that of the normal samples (p < 0.001). Among patients with liver disease, SPIB protein expression levels differ significantly according to the stage of liver disease, specifically between stages I, II, and III of HCC (p < 0.05). SPIB expression was also shown to be significantly correlated with age (p = 0.046) and histological grade (p = 0.027). Furthermore, the SurvExpress analysis suggested that high SPIB and KI-67 mRNA expression were significantly associated with the poor survival of patients with HCC (p < 0.05). Our results indicate that cross-talk in the expression of SPIB and KI-67 may be associated with poor prognosis and may potentially serve as a clinical prognostic indicator of HCC. This is the first time that such an association has been reported.