Increased expression of FAM83B predicts poor prognosis in patients with gastric cancer

FAM83B (family with sequence similarity 83, member B) has been recently reported to be an oncogene, which is associated with the prognosis of various human cancers. However, the role of expression of FAM83B in gastric cancer (GC) is unknown. In this study, we examined the expression of FAM83B in human GC by using quantitative real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), Western blotting and immunohistochemistry. The correlation between FAM83B expression and clinicopathological parameters of GC was assessed with the chi-square test. Survival analysis according to FAM83B expression was performed by Kaplan-Meier method. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were applied to reveal the prognostic value of FAM83B expression. Our results showed that FAM83B mRNA expression level was significantly higher in GC tissues than in adjacent noncancerous tissues (P<0.001). This trend in expression levels was validated by Western blotting and immunohistochemistry. Also, we found that high expression of FAM83B was significantly correlated with tumor size (P=0.026), clinical stage (P=0.018), depth of invasion (P=0.019), histological grade (P=0.004), perineural invasion (P=0.001) and vascular invasion (P=0.04). Kaplan-Meier survival curves showed that patients with higher FAM83B expression levels had poorer recurrence free survival (RFS; P<0.001) and overall survival (OS; P<0.001). Furthermore, multivariate Cox analysis indicated that an elevated FAM83B expression level was an independent poor prognosis factor for RFS and OS in GC patients. In conclusions, the expression of FAM83B in GC tends to be up regulated, and may serve an important role in assessing GC patient prognosis.