Introduction: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer worldwide, accounting for approximately 10% of all cancer cases and is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Therefore, it is necessary to discover more effective therapeutic targets and diagnostic/prognostic biomarkers in this cancer. The oncogenic role of BIRC5 in various cancers such as breast, lung, and gastric cancers has been identified. On the other hand, bioinformatics studies showed that BIRC5 may be up-regulated in CRC. For this reason, the aim of this study was investigation of BIRC5 expression in colorectal tissue samples and evaluation of its potential as therapeutic target and diagnostic biomarker in this cancer.
Methods: The colorectal 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 BIRC5 expression. Paired t-test was used for comparison of BIRC5 expression in tumor and normal samples and receiver operating curve (ROC) was used to assess the diagnostic value of BIRC5.
Results: The qPCR results showed that the expression of BIRC5 was up-regulated in thirty paired colorectal cancer specimens (logFC= 3.502, p-value= 0.0002). The AUC of ROC curve was 0.84 (p-value=0.0003) and revealed that the expression level of BIRC5 can detect up to 84% of cases of colorectal cancer and can be used as a diagnostic biomarker.
Conclusion: BIRC5 may acts as an oncogene in the CRC and may be have important role in CRC progression and metastasis. This is suggested that the potential of this gene as a therapeutic target and biomarker in the different stages of CRC is evaluated in the large populations.
Keywords: BIRC5 , colorectal cancer, cancer progression, cancer metastasis, qPCR