CRTC2 as a novel prognostic biomarker for worse pathologic outcomes and biochemical recurrence after radical prostatectomy in patients with prostate cancer

PURPOSE: To identify the association between tumor metabolism and prostate cancer (PCa), we investigated the relationship between expression of metabolism-related genes and clinicopathologic outcomes in patients with localized PCa. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We prospectively collected periprostatic adipose tissue from 40 PCa patients and extracted the RNA of each sample. After cDNA was synthesized from the extracted RNA, we analyzed the expression of 18 metabolism-related genes using real-time polymerase chain reaction. We divided the subjects according to the pathologic Gleason score (pGS) and compared the expression of each gene. Subsequently, the clinicopathologic outcomes were also compared according to the expression of each gene. RESULTS: When we compared the expression of 18 metabolism-related genes between the high (≥4+3) and low pGS groups (3+4), there were significant differences in the expression of six genes (SREBP, SCD, FASN, ACLY, ECHS, and CRTC2; p<0.05). Among them, the subjects with low expression for CRTC2 showed significantly worse pathologic outcomes in terms of high pGS (≥4+3) (p=0.020) and higher rates of seminal vesicle invasion (p=0.017). The low CRTC2 group also showed significantly inferior biochemical recurrence-free survival than the high CRTC2 group (p=0.048). CONCLUSIONS: We found that high pGS patients showed significant differences in expression of several metabolism-related genes compared with low pGS patients. Among those genes, CRTC2 showed the strongest association with pathologic outcome, as well as postoperative survival.