Overexpression of ERCC3 is associated with poor prognosis in patients with pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer is associated with poor prognosis due to limited therapeutic options. Excision repair cross-complementing 3 (ERCC3) is an important member of nucleotide excision repair (NER) that is overexpressed in some cancers and may be regarded as a poor prognostic factor. Yet, its role in pancreatic cancer remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the expression and functions of ERCC3 in pancreatic cancer patients and its relation with clinicopathological features. Our data suggested that the protein expression level of ERCC3 was higher in tumor tissues than in adjacent tissues. In addition, the expression of ERCC3 has shown to be associated with the tumor extent (p=0.035). Besides, analysis of the dataset in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) revealed that high expression of ERCC3 was associated with poor overall survival in pancreatic cancer patients (p=0.0136). In Cox regression analysis, ERCC3 was an independent prognostic factor for overall survival in pancreatic cancer (p<0.001). Furthermore, our in vitro data further suggested that the overexpression of ERCC3 significantly promoted pancreatic cancer (BxPC-3, CFPAC-1, and PANC-1 cells) proliferation, invasion, and migration. Taken together, this study suggested that high expression of ERCC3 might be a poor prognostic factor in human pancreatic cancer and might be used as a promising therapeutic target for pancreatic cancer treatment.