High GP73 expression correlates with poor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and survival in gastric cancer

Abstract Background：Golgi protein 73 (GP73) is a type II Golgi transmembrane protein which is over expressed in several cancers, however, its role in gastric cancer is still unclear. The aim of this study is to investigate if high GP73 expression is associated with pathological tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and prognosis for patients with gastric cancer. Methods：A total of 348 patients with gastric cancer, who had undergone surgery between 1999 and 2011 were retrospectively reviewed, GP73 expression was examined in tumor tissues using tissue microarray (TMA), the correlations between its expression and pathological response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy as well as patient prognosis were analyzed. Results：We found that GP73 expression was not associated with clinicopathologic features including tumor size, differentiation and TNM stage. High expression of GP73 was associated with less pathological tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and poor survival in gastric cancer, multivariate analysis showed GP73 expression was an independent predictor for pathological response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and for prognosis in patient with gastric cancer. Conclusions：Our results suggest that GP73 is a promising biomarker to identify patients with poor prognosis as well as a promising predictor for the effect of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in gastric cancer.