Kapoor Ankita, Bayat Mokhtari Reza, Sonti Sahithi Savithri, Patel Riya, George Anthony, Attwood Kristopher, Iyer Renuka, Chakraborty Sayan
Department of Hematology-Oncology, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, NY 14263, USA.
Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, NY 14263, USA.
Cancers (Basel). 2024 Jul 31;16(15):2719. doi: 10.3390/cancers16152719.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the predominant form of liver cancer, is associated with high mortality rates both in the United States and globally. Despite current advances in immunotherapy regimens, there is a scarcity of biomarkers to guide therapy selection. Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) and glypican-3 have been proposed as biomarkers for HCC, but they do not provide any prognostic benefit for modeling disease progression. Agrin, a secreted proteoglycan, is frequently overexpressed in HCC and plays prominent role(s) in the liver tumor microenvironment (TME) to promote hepatocarcinogenesis. Here we employed a pilot single-center retrospective investigation to assess the prognostic value of agrin in HCC. Our evidence suggests that elevated serum agrin levels are associated with poor prognosis and performance among HCC patients. Multivariate Cox regression models indicate that secreted agrin serves as a better prognostic indicator compared to AFP that is significantly correlated with other secreted biomarkers (e.g., IL6). Cumulatively, this work demonstrates a promising clinical value of agrin in the detection and prognosis of HCC.
肝细胞癌（HCC）是肝癌的主要形式，在美国和全球范围内都与高死亡率相关。尽管目前免疫治疗方案取得了进展，但用于指导治疗选择的生物标志物仍然匮乏。甲胎蛋白（AFP）和磷脂酰肌醇蛋白聚糖-3已被提议作为HCC的生物标志物，但它们对疾病进展建模并无任何预后益处。聚集蛋白是一种分泌型蛋白聚糖，在HCC中经常过度表达，并在肝脏肿瘤微环境（TME）中发挥重要作用以促进肝癌发生。在此，我们进行了一项单中心回顾性初步研究，以评估聚集蛋白在HCC中的预后价值。我们的证据表明，血清聚集蛋白水平升高与HCC患者的不良预后和表现相关。多变量Cox回归模型表明，与AFP相比，分泌型聚集蛋白是更好的预后指标，AFP与其他分泌型生物标志物（如IL6）显著相关。总体而言，这项研究证明了聚集蛋白在HCC检测和预后方面具有可观的临床价值。
