Expression Of Survivin In Human Colorectal Cancer Tissue And Correlation With Clinicopathologic Findings

Colorectal cancer (cancer of the colon and rectum) is one of the most common types of malignant cancer, which is the third in morbidity and forth leading cause of cancer-related death. So far there are no specific markers for early diagnosis and prognosis. Survivin, as an apoptosis inhibitor, is a member of the inhibitor of apoptosis (IAP) family. The survivin protein is highly expressed in most human tumors and fetal tissue, but is completely absent in terminally differentiated cells. This fact therefore makes survivin an ideal target for cancer therapy. The survivin protein play crucial roles in inhibiting apoptosis, enhancing cell proliferation, regulating mitosis, and fetal development. It is also involved in angiogenesis. In this paper, we used immunohistochemical staining to check the expression of survivin in colorectal cancer and adjacent normal tissue to analyze the correlations of survivin to other pathological factors. The results showed survivin is highly expressed in colorectal cancer (67.2%), but not in adjacent normal tissue, which is significantly different. However the expression of survivin is not correlated to the age and gender of the patients, tumor size, tumor location, and tumor differential level. It is correlated to Dukes stage and lymph node metastasis. In Dukes C and D colorectal cancer along with lymph node metastasis, the expression of survivin was 74% (37/50) and 73.5% (36/49) respectively, significantly higher than that in Dukes A and B cancer without metastasis. By following-up the patients, we found the survivin negative patients were potent to survive longer than survivin positive ones, time to tumor progression (TTP) was 8.8±1.59 months in the former versus 5.5±1.2 months in the latter. Moreover, 5-year survival rate is higher in negative patients than that in positive patients. Our results implied that the expression of survivin was contributed to the initiation of colorectal cancer and may play important role in the development of the cancer. It is also a useful marker to predict the prognosis of the patients with colorectal cancer. This study provided solid data from clinical samples to explore the biological function of survivin in colorectal cancer.