Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2016 Oct 25;7(43):69916-69926.
doi: 10.18632/oncotarget.12066.

Evaluating clinical and prognostic implications of Glypican-3 in hepatocellular carcinoma

Ahmed Omar Kaseb  1 , Manal Hassan  1 , Sahin Lacin  1   2 , Reham Abdel-Wahab  1   3 , Hesham M Amin  4 , Ahmed Shalaby  1 , Robert A Wolff  1 , James Yao  1 , Asif Rashid  4 , Bharathi Vennapusa  5 , Janine Feng  5 , Toshihiko Ohtomo  6
Affiliations

Evaluating clinical and prognostic implications of Glypican-3 in hepatocellular carcinoma

Ahmed Omar Kaseb et al. Oncotarget. .

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most deadly cancers worldwide. In patients with HCC, histopathogical differentiation is an important indicator of prognosis; however, because determination of HCC differentiation is difficult, the recently described immunohistochemical (IHC) marker glypican3 (GPC3) might assist in HCC prognostication.The goal of our study was to investigate GPC3's IHC staining pattern and define the relationship between its expression and patients' clinicopathologic features and overall survival. We retrieved clinical parameters from 101 pathologically diagnosed HCC patients' medical records and classified these patients into 4 clinical score categories (0-3) based on increasing GPC3 staining intensity and the percentage of stained tumor cells in their resection and biopsy specimens. Histopathological samples were well, moderately, and poorly differentiated in 33, 22, and 12 patients, respectively, and the GPC3 expression rate was 63%, 86%, and 92%,respectively. The median overall survival was 49.9 months (confidence interval (CI): 35.3-64.6 months) for clinical scores 0-1 and 30.7 months (CI: 19.4-41.9 months) for clinical scores 2-3. This difference was not statistically significant (P = .06) but showed a strong trend. In conclusion, a greater GPC3 expression is associated with a worse HCC prognosis and may be a promising prognostic marker.

Keywords: glypican-3; hepatocellular carcinoma; immunohistochemistry.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Comparison of risk factors, epidemiological parameters, demographic characteristics, and clinicopathological parameters between patients with a clinical score of 0–1 and those with a clinical score of 2–3
Figure 2
Figure 2. Overall survival (OS) and the 95% confidence interval (CI) in patients with clinical scores of 0–1 and 2–3 include A) among all study participants, B) among surgically treated patients, C) among local therapy treated patients, and D) among systemic therapy treated patients
Figure 3
Figure 3. Variations in paired biopsy and resection clinical scores for 26 patients
Figure 4
Figure 4. Hepatocellular carcinoma tissue samples showing the correlation between staining and clinical score categories
Left panel: representative examples of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained HCC tumors. Right panel: representative examples of Glypican-3-stained HCC tumors. The immunohistochemical scores range from 0 (negative) to 3+.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Ferlay J, Soerjomataram I, Dikshit R, Eser S, Mathers C, Rebelo M, Parkin DM, Forman D, Bray F. Cancer incidence and mortality worldwide: sources, methods and major patterns in GLOBOCAN 2012. Int J Cancer. 2015;136:E359–386. - PubMed
    1. Yeh CN, Lee WC, Chen MF. Hepatic resection and prognosis for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma larger than 10 cm: two decades of experience at Chang Gung memorial hospital. Ann Surg Oncol. 2003;10:1070–1076. - PubMed
    1. Poon RT, Fan ST, Wong J. Selection criteria for hepatic resection in patients with large hepatocellular carcinoma larger than 10 cm in diameter. J Am Coll Surg. 2002;194:592–602. - PubMed
    1. Borscheri N, Roessner A, Rocken C. Canalicular immunostaining of neprilysin (CD10) as a diagnostic marker for hepatocellular carcinomas. Am J Surg Pathol. 2001;25:1297–1303. - PubMed
    1. Wang L, Vuolo M, Suhrland MJ, Schlesinger K. HepPar1, MOC-31, pCEA, mCEA and CD10 for distinguishing hepatocellular carcinoma vs. metastatic adenocarcinoma in liver fine needle aspirates. Acta Cytol. 2006;50:257–262. - PubMed