TITLE:
Human Epididymis Protein-4 Gene Expression as a Biomarker in Patients with Ovarian Cancer in Iran
AUTHORS:
Arezo Shahi, Naghmeh Bahrami, Atefeh Fakharian, Somayeh Sharifynia, Elham Moslemi, Amir Izadi, Adnan Khosravi, Hamidreza Jamaati, Abdolreza Mohamadnia
KEYWORDS:
Ovarian Neoplasms, Genomics, Tumor Biomarkers, HE4 Protein
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Clinical Diagnostics,
Vol.7 No.3,
August
14,
2017
ABSTRACT: Introduction: Ovarian cancer is one of the most common malignancies in women and the
fifth cause of cancer-related deaths in women worldwide. Contrary to the
challenges in developing new clinical markers using the conventional methods,
recent advances in genomics and proteomics have led to identification of
candidate and promising biomarkers for the diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Human
epididymis protein 4 (HE4) is such a marker that has recently been reported to
correlate with recurrence or progression of epithelial ovarian cancer. The
purpose of this study was to measure the expression level of HE4 gene in women
with ovarian cancer. Methodology: We evaluated and compared paraffin-embedded tissue samples of 20
ovarian cancer patients with 10 samples from healthy individuals. RNA was
initially extracted from the samples and cDNA was synthetized. Gene expression
level was then measured using real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Results:
Our results demonstrated that HE4 gene expression level was significantly
higher in samples of patients with ovarian cancer compared with samples from
healthy individuals. Moreover, higher levels of HE4 gene expression were
associated with more advanced disease and larger tumor size. Conclusion:
HE4 gene over-expression has the potential
to be used as a biomarker for detecting early-stage ovarian cancer in
women. Future more comprehensive studies are needed to confirm our findings.