Diagnostic and prognostic values of upregulated SPC25 in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

Xiaolin Yang; Hongzhi Sun; Ying Song; Li Yang; Haibo Liu

doi:10.7717/peerj.9535

Diagnostic and prognostic values of upregulated SPC25 in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

PeerJ. 2020 Jul 16:8:e9535. doi: 10.7717/peerj.9535. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Xiaolin Yang^#¹, Hongzhi Sun^#², Ying Song³, Li Yang⁴, Haibo Liu⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Geriatrics, the First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China.
² Department of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine, The Second Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China.
³ Department of Gastroenterology, The Second Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China.
⁴ Department of Gastroenterology, First Automobile Works General Hospital of Jilin Province, Changchun, China.
⁵ Department of Emergency, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Background: Spindle pole body component 25 (SPC25) plays a vital role in many cellular processes, such as tumorigenesis. However, the clinical significance of SPC25 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has not been investigated. This study aimed to explore the expression patterns of SPC25 in HCC and non-neoplastic tissues and to investigate the diagnostic and prognostic values of SPC25.

Method: The expression of SPC25 was examined in 374 HCC issues and 50 non-neoplastic tissues from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort. The diagnostic and prognostic values of SPC25 were analyzed via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and survival analyses, respectively. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were used to identify the prognostic factors and to establish a nomogram. The diagnostic and prognostic values were further validated in an external cohort from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) database.

Results: The expression of SPC25 in HCC tissues was significantly higher than that in normal tissues in both cohorts (all P < 0.001). The ROC curve analysis indicated that SPC25 expression has high diagnostic value in HCC with area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.969 (95% confidence interval [CI] [0.948-0.984]) and 0.945 (95% CI [0.920-0.965]) for TCGA and ICGC cohorts, respectively. Patients with HCC exhibiting high SPC25 expression were associated with worse prognosis than those exhibiting low SPC25 expression in both cohorts (all P < 0.001). SPC25 was independently associated with overall survival in both cohorts (all P < 0.001). The concordance indices of the nomogram for predicting overall survival in TCGA and ICGC cohorts were 0.647 and 0.805, respectively, which were higher than those of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system.

Conclusion: SPC25 was upregulated in HCC and independently predicted poor overall survival of patients with HCC. Therefore, SPC25 is an effective diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for HCC. An SPC25-based nomogram was more accurate and useful than the AJCC staging system to predict prognosis of HCC.

Keywords: Biomarker; Diagnosis; Hepatocellular carcinoma; Prognosis; SPC25; TCGA.

Grants and funding

The authors received no funding for this work.