Legumain Protein as a Potential Predictive Biomarker for Asian Patients with Breast Carcinoma

Background: Treatment for breast cancer is mainly performed by surgical resection of primary tumors andchemotherapy. However, after tumor invasion and metastases, breast cancer is hard to control. Clarification ofthe pathogenic mechanisms would be helpful to the prognosis or therapy for the breast cancer. The aim of thisstudy is to investigate the clinical and prognostic implications of legumain protein Materials and
Methods: Inthis study, we examined mastectomy specimens from 114 breast cancer and matching, 26 adjacent non-canceroustissues using immunohistochemistry.
Results: The results indicated that positive expression of legumain proteinin breast cancer was 51.8 % (59/114) and the positive expression of legumain protein in adjacent non-canceroustissue was 11.5% (3/26). It appeared to be related with lymph node metastasis of breast cancer (p=0.02) andcorrelation analysis indicated that legumain expression was correlated positively with the estrogen receptor (ER)and mutant-type p53 expression (both p<0.05). Positive legumain expression was significantly associated withshorter overall survival time in breast cancer patients (log-rank p<0.01). Multivariate survival analysis suggestedthat the positive legumain expression was an independent predictor of poorer overall survival in patients withbreast cancer (HR=0.24; 95%CI 0.11-0.65, p=0.03).
Conclusions: Legumain might be a new potential biomarkerfor breast cancer, which may reflect the prognosis and overall survival.