Clinical significance of chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor II expression in human colorectal cancer

Chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor 11 (COUP-TFII) plays an essential role in angiogenesis and development. A previous study showed that the expression of COUP-TFII enhanced invasiveness of human lung carcinoma cells. However, no published data are available concerning the biological and clinical significance of COUP-TFII expression in colorectal cancer. Thus, Our objective was to explore the expression of COUP-TFII in colorectal cancer as well as its association with clinicopathological features, and to evaluate the role of COUP-TFII as a prognostic indicator in colorectal cancer. We investigated the presence of COUP-TFII in human colorectal cancer tissues and adjacent normal tissues from 95 primary colorectal cancer patients by immunohistochemistry. The correlation between the expression of COUP TFII and clinicopathologic features was investigated. The 3-year disease-free survival (DFS) and overall Survival (OS) of patients with tumors expressing different levels of COUP-TFII were evaluated by the Kaplan-Meier method. No significant correlation was found between COUP-TFII expression and age at surgery, gender, histopathologic differentiation, vessel invasion, carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), or nodal involvement. However, survival analysis showed that the COUP-TFII-positive group had a significantly better OS compared to COUP-TFII-negative group (80.4% vs. 57.7%, P=0.0491). Based on our results, COUP-TFII may represent a biomarker for good prognosis in colorectal cancer.