Background: Tyrosine kinase growth factor receptors (TKGFRs) play an important role in the progression of cancer. A variety of studies have investigated the clinicopathologic correlation of these receptors and their influences on patient survival in different types of cancer. As the members of TKGFRs, the biomarkers c-MET, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2) have been extensively investigated in biliary tract cancer (BTC). However, their prognostic value is still controversial. Our study aimed to evaluate the prognostic significance of the three markers in BTC patients based on the published studies. The correlation between high expression of these markers and clinical parameters or overall survival (OS) has been assumed in this paper.
Materials and methods: Including PubMed, EMBASE, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and Springer, a comprehensive search for the related literature published in Chinese and English has been done. Finally, 31 studies were selected in our research.
Results: Surprisingly, the meta-analysis indicated that HER-2 high expression was not correlated with age, gender, primary tumor, tumor node metastasis (TNM) stage, lymph node status, and differentiation. We also found that EGFR high expression was not associated with the parameters, such as age, gender, TNM stage, differentiation, or lymph node status. c-MET high-expression was not associated with age, differentiation, gender, TNM stage, or lymph node status. In addition, our study showed that HER-2, EGFR, and c-MET high expression had an adverse influence on OS in BTC, the pooled hazard ratio for HER-2, EGFR, and c-MET was statistically significant.
Conclusion: The present meta-analysis indicated that EGFR and HER-2 high expression have little impact on OS in patients with BTC while c-MET high expression influenced OS in patients with BTC to a large extent. However, c-MET, EGFR, and HER-2 expression did not show any correlation with those clinical parameters. c-MET may be a potential therapeutic target for BTC.
Keywords: Biliary tract cancer; c-MET; epidermal growth factor receptor; human epidermal growth factor receptor 2; meta-analysis.