Journal des biomarqueurs moléculaires et du diagnostic

Investigation of hTERT Expression Level and its Relation with Clinicopathological Features and Resistance to Chemotherapy in Colorectal Cancer Patients

Abstract

Samira Shabani, Frouzandeh Mahjoubi, Bahar Mahjoubi and Rezvan Mirzaee

One of the most common causes of mortality in the world is cancer. In spite of advancement in cancer treatments, the clinical outcome is far away from expectation yet. Drug resistance remains a major obstacle to the effective cure of almost all of the cancers. Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein enzyme that contains an extremely conserved reverse transcriptase (TERT) component and a template RNA component (TERC or TR). Telomerase activity is infrequently present in normal somatic cells, but it is observed in most cancer cells. This enzyme is actually a key enzyme for human cells to acquire immortality. This study was conducted to investigate possible association between telomerase expression and clinicopathological features as well as the feasible correlation between telomerase expression and clinical response to chemotherapy in Iranian colorectal cancer patients. In this regards tumoral and adjacent normal tissues of 50 colon cancer patients were assessed for the expression level of telomerase quantitative PCR. A significant correlation was found between telomerase expression level and the stage of cancer. hTERT expression level was significantly increased in early stage tumors. No association was seen between telomerase expression and other clinical features such as age, size of the tumor, lymph node involvement. Regarding to the observations, it seems expression changes of hTERT can be employed as an important marker in the diagnosis of human colorectal cancer at an early stage after performing some complementary tests.