Clinical Significance of TRIM44 Expression in Patients with Gastric Cancer

BACKGROUND: Despite the tremendous efforts in finding a valuable markers for risk stratifying gastric cancer (GC) patients; still, management of this cancer faces multiple obstacles. Given this, we designed a study to explore the possible relationship between the tripartite motif-containing 44 (TRIM44) gene expression, and the outcome of the GC patients. METHODS: The real-time quantitative PCR method was used to evaluate the mRNA expression level of TRIM44, and β-catenin in fresh primary tumor and adjacent normal tissues collected from 40 GC patients. The Pearson’s correlation test, Kaplan–Meier method, and Cox proportional-hazards regression were performed to examine the association of TRIM44 expression with some clinicopathological data and the patients’ overall survival (OS). RESULTS: The expression level of both TRIM44 and β-catenin was remarkably higher in GC tissues than in normal tissues (Fold change=1.71, p=0.004). In subgroup analysis based on the TRIM44 expression, pateints with high TRIM44 expression level exhibited poorer overall survival (HR = 1.46, 95% CI: 1.07-1.98, p=0.016). More strikingly, a positive correlation was also found between the expression of TRIM44 and β-catenin in GC, indicating that TRIM44 might exert its oncogenic activities probably through the β-catenin axis. CONCLUSION: This study highlighted the potent value of TRIM44 as an independent prognostic factor in gastric cancer and shed light on the probable interplay between this tripartite motif-containing protein and β-catenin. However, further investigations, especially with a larger sample size, are required to study the effect of TRIM44 in GC more precisely.