Overexpression of LAMC2 predicts poor prognosis in colorectal cancer patients and promotes cancer cell proliferation, migration, and invasion

Laminin gamma 2 (LAMC2) has been reported to be involved in the development and progression of a variety of tumors. However, its function in human colorectal cancer is unclear. Our study aimed to investigate the role of laminin gamma 2 in colorectal cancer. We first performed the multiple Kaplan-Meier survival analysis of laminin gamma 2 in a cohort of Gene Expression Omnibus datasets and evaluated its relationship with clinical outcomes of colorectal cancer patients. Then, we established stable colorectal cancer cell lines with laminin gamma 2 overexpression and examined the functional assays in vitro. Finally the expression pattern of laminin gamma 2 in colorectal cancer clinical samples was analyzed by immunohistochemistry and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. We found that laminin gamma 2 was significantly correlated with poor clinical outcomes such as disease-specific, recurrence-free, disease-free, and overall survival in colorectal cancer. Moreover, stably overexpressing laminin gamma 2 promoted proliferation, migration, and invasion of colorectal cancer cells. In addition, overexpressed laminin gamma 2 was identified in tumor tissues compared with paired adjacent normal tissues and was related to tumor-node-metastasis stage (p = 0.001) and lymph node metastasis (p < 0.001). In summary, our results strongly suggest that laminin gamma 2 may be a potential prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target in colorectal cancer.