A Prognostic Role Of Ecto-5’-Nucleotidase(CD73) In Breast Cancer Patients

Background and Objective:Recently, there is increasing interest to investigate the target therapy in cancer patients. Ecto-50-nucleotidase (CD73) is a membrane-bound enzyme, which catalyzes the conversion of adenosine monophosphate to adenosine. CD73 has been postulated to play an important role in carcinogenesis, as adenosine promotes tumor progression and CD73-expressing cancer cell lines are more aggressive. This study investigated the clinical significance of CD73 expression in breast cancer.Materials and method:The study group included 102 breast cancer patients treated between 2011 and 2012 from The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University. CD73 expression was examined by immunohistochemistry(IHC) on tissue, using antihuman rabbit monoclonal antibody. Survival curves were generated by the Kaplan-Meier method and compared using the log-rank test. CD73 staining was expressed as the score calculated by multiplying the staining intensity (0=negative, 1=weak,2=intermediate,3=strong) and percentage of positive cells (0% to 100%).Result:CD73 expression was observed more highly on the membrane of cancer cells and it occurred in 74.5% (76/102) of the cases. Significant difference in CD73 expression was observed between age, ER,PR,HER2,KI67, neoadjuvant chemotherapy, premenopausal, and axillary lymph node metastasis(P<0.001). However, no correlation was found between CD73 expression with disease-free survival and overall survival (P=0.098;P=0.198) in Kaplan-Meier analysis. But multivariate Cox analysis for disease-free survival revealed correlation with ER, PR and CD73 status.Conclusion:CD73 may be considered as an important and independent marker in predicting the outcome of breast cancer patients as well as their response to treatment. A powerful and reliable tool to measure its expression should be devised in future in an attempt to finding a cure for triple negative breast cancer.