Low expression of the ubiquitin ligase FBXW7 correlates with poor prognosis of patients with colorectal cancer

FBXW7 is a potential tumor suppressor that regulates ubiquitination and proteolysis of multiple targets such as cyclin E, c-Myc, c-Jun and Notch. However, little knows about the correlation between FBXW7 and prognosis of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). In this study, we detected FBXW7 expression in CRC tissue microarray which includes 568 cases cancer tissue and their paired adjacent non-cancerous tissues. We found that FBXW7 expression was significantly reduced in CRC tissues versus paired normal colon tissues (P < 0.001). Moreover, low FBXW7 expression was significantly associated with increased lymph node metastasis (P < 0.001) and advanced TNM stage (P < 0.001). Besides, the low expression of FBXW7 indicated the poor prognosis in CRC patients for both overall and disease-free cumulative survival (P < 0.001 and P = 0.003, respectively). Multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that low FBXW7 expression was an independent unfavorable prognostic factor of CRC (hazard ratio = 0.45, P = 0.001). In conclusion, we can indicate that FBXW7 may play essential roles in the progression of CRC and function as an independent prognostic marker for clinical diagnosis and therapy treatment of patients with CRC.