• Investigation of KIFC1 expression in gastric cancer
  • Zohreh Al-Zahra Abdellahi,1 Tahereh Sadeghian-Rizi,2 Mansoureh Azadeh,3,*
    1. Department of Genetics, Faculty of Biological Sciences and Technology, Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani University, Isfahan, Iran
    2. Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Biological Sciences and Technology, Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani University, Isfahan, Iran
    3. دپارتمان زیست فناوری نوین-اصفهان


  • Introduction: Gastric cancer is the one most common cancer in the world. In most cases, the disease is diagnosed at a stage when common therapies do not have a significant impact on the patient's life. Therefore, the need to study effective molecular mechanisms to introduce molecular markers for rapid detection of prognosis is strongly felt. KIFC1 is overexpressed in various cancers including breast, liver, bladder and ovarian cancers. According to the bioinformatics studies, KIFC1 may be oncogenic gene in gastric cancer. For this reason, the aim of this study was investigation of KIFC1expression in stomach tissue samples and evaluation of its potential as therapeutic target and diagnostic biomarker in this cancer.
  • Methods: The gastric tumor samples and adjacent normal tissue samples were collected from thirty patients. After total RNA extraction from samples and cDNA synthesis, Real-time PCR was used to measure the KIFC1 expression. Paired t-test was used for comparison of KIFC1 expression in tumor and normal samples and receiver operating curve (ROC) was used to assess the diagnostic value of KIFC1.
  • Results: The qPCR results showed that the expression of KIFC1 was up-regulated in thirty paired gastric cancer specimens (LogFC=4.5, p-value = 0.0001). The AUC of ROC curve was 0.9 (p-value=0.0001) and revealed that the expression level of KIFC1 can detect up to 90% of cases of gastric cancer and can be used as a diagnostic biomarker.
  • Conclusion: Finally, the authors suggest that the considerably up-regulation of KIFC1 in gastric tumor samples and its potential as biomarker highlight the need to further investigation of this lncRNA in larger population and cohort studies.
  • Keywords: KIFC1, Gastric cancer, cancer progression, cancer metastasis, qPCR