Prognostic and clinicopathological significance of DEPTOR expression in cancer patients: a meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: DEP domain containing mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR)-interacting protein (DEPTOR), a recently discovered endogenous inhibitor of mTOR, has been found to be abnormally expressed in various tumors. Recent studies have demonstrated that DEPTOR could serve as a potential prognostic biomarker in several kinds of cancer. However, the prognostic value of DEPTOR is still controversial so far. PATIENTS AND METHODS: PubMed, Embase and Web of Science were systematically searched to obtain all relevant articles about the prognostic value of DEPTOR in cancer patients. ORs or HRs with corresponding 95% CIs were pooled to estimate the association between DEP-TOR expression and the clinicopathological characteristics or survival of cancer patients. RESULTS: A total of nine eligible studies with 974 cancer patients were included in our meta-analysis. Our results demonstrated that the expression of DEPTOR was not associated with the overall survival (OS) (pooled HR=0.795, 95% CI=0.252–2.509) and event-free survival (EFS) (pooled HR=1.244, 95% CI=0.543–2.848) in cancer patients. Furthermore, subgroup analysis divided by sample size, type of cancer, Newcastle–Ottawa Scale (NOS) score and evaluation of DEPTOR expression showed identical prognostic value. In addition, our analysis also revealed that there was no significant association between expression level of DEPTOR and clinicopathological characteristics, such as tumor stage, lymph node metastasis, differentiation grade and gender. CONCLUSION: Our meta-analysis suggested that despite the fact that DEPTOR could be overexpressed or downregulated in cancer patients, it might not be a potential marker to predict the prognosis of cancer patients.