PRR14 is an independent predictor of poor prognosis in resected non-small cell lung cancer patients

Recently PRR14 has been found to be involved in lung carcinogenesis, and the high-level mRNA expression of PRR14 is associated with worse survival overall in lung cancers. However, there are few studies focused on the problem. Therefore, we evaluated the expression of PRR14 by immmunohistochemistry and the associations with prognosis in resected non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. Totally, a number of 199 patients were enrolled in our study. We found that PRR14 was nuclear staining in lung tumor samples and positive expression in 95 out of 199 NSCLC patients (47.7%). PRR14 expression was significantly associated with gender, smoking history, histological type, lymph node infiltration in resected NSCLC patients (all P<0.05). Patients with PRR14-positive expression had worse 5-year survival (P=0.002) and shorter progression-free survival (PFS, P= 0.006) than patients with PRR14-negative expression by univariate analysis. More interestingly, the multivariate analysis also suggested that PRR14 positive expression was significantly related to poorer OS and PFS (all P<0.05), independent of the clinicopathological features of NSCLC patients. Thus, our study indicated that PRR14 was an independent predictor of unfavorable prognosis in resected NSCLC patients and may serve as a potential target.