Evaluation of Expression Levels of NFATc2 and PPARG Genes Two Effector Elements of WNT Pathway in Non-Small Cell Lung Carcinoma

BACKGROUND: There is an emergency need in discovering an efficient profile of molecular biomarkers for early diagnosis of Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Transcription factors as important groups of regulators that are able to adjust the cell cycles have attracted the attention of most researchers recently. NFATc2 and PPARG are two important factors that have been selected for this project to assess their potential for being a biomarker for NSCLC. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Here in this study, 50 NSCLC patients were included. During bronchoscopy, which was their routine diagnostic approach, we collected tumoral and marginal normal tissues. After the extraction of the total RNA from the tissues, cDNA was synthesized, and the transcriptional level of NFATc2 and PPARG was examined by quantitative real-time PCR. Subsequently, the data were analyzed by proper statistical analyses. RESULTS: The mRNA expression of NFATc2 and PPARG were down-regulated in biopsy tissues of NSCLC patients compared with their pair marginal tissues (P(values) were 0.0011 and <0.0001 respectively). Moreover, both of them had significant AUC (area under the curve) in the ROC curve analysis (0.65 for NFATc2 and 0.81 for PPARG, P(value) <0.05). CONCLUSION: It appears that mRNA expression of NFATc2 and PPARG possesses the potential to be regarded as a diagnostic or prognostic biomarker for NSCLC.