Biomedical Research

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the expression status of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), myeloid differentiation primary response protein 88 (MyD88) and signal transducers and activators of transcription 3 (STAT3) in colorectal cancer (CRC) by immunohistochemistry (IHC), and explore the relationship between their expression and clinicopathological features.

Materials and Methods: Expression of TLR4/MyD88/STAT3 was detected using IHC staining in 20 colorectal adenomas, 40 CRC samples and 40 matched non-tumor tissues, and the correlations between their immunoscores and clinicopathological variables were analysed.

Results: The IHC results showed that the tumor sites exhibited significantly higher levels of all these three proteins compared to the adenoma and adjacent non-tumor sites. Further data analysis showed the expression of TLR4, MyD88 and STAT3 was positively correlated with each other in CRC tissue samples. Among clinicopathological parameters, overexpression of TLR4 was significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis (LNM) (P=0.023), MyD88 expression was significantly associated with the degree of differentiation (P=0.006), LNM (P=0.009) and Tumor-Node-Metastasis (TNM) stage (P=0.018), whereas STAT3 expression was significantly associated with tumor size (P=0.013), LNM (P=0.001) and TNM stage (P=0.002).

Conclusion: The overexpression of TLR4/MyD88/STAT3 proteins may play an important role in the pathogenesis of CRC.

Author(s): Lei Zhou, Hui-Zhi Liang, Heng Zhang, Xiang-Yang Wang, Dan Xu, Jie Wu
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