Overexpression of RHEB is associated with metastasis and poor prognosis in hepatocellular carcinoma.

Overexpression of RHEB is associated with metastasis and poor prognosis in hepatocellular carcinoma. Oncol Lett. 2018 Mar;15(3):3838-3845 Authors: Liu F, Pan Z, Zhang J, Ni J, Wang C, Wang Z, Gu F, Dong W, Zhou W, Liu H Abstract Aberrant expression of Ras homolog enriched in brain (RHEB) has been observed in a variety of cancer tissues and is closely associated with clinicopathological features. However, the expression profile of RHEB in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and its clinical signature with underlying mechanisms have not been explored thus far. To analyze the association between RHEB expression and clinicopathological features, the RHEB expression levels were determined in the present study using gene microarrays, immunohistochemistry and western blotting in 60 liver cancer tissues and 35 normal liver tissues. Downregulation of RHEB expression in liver cancer cell lines was achieved by RNA interfering technology to explore its biological function in HCC. RHEB expression was high in liver cancer tissues, with an increase of 2.00±0.19-fold compared with normal tissues and of 2.00±0.27-fold compared with adjacent non-cancer tissues. RHEB expression increased along with the clinical staging of HCC, and the overall survival and mortality of patients were closely correlated to RHEB levels, micro-vascular invasion, hepatitis B virus-DNA titer, tumor differentiation and pathological satellites (P<0.05). After knoc...
Source: Oncology Letters - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: Oncol Lett Source Type: research