Shin DW, Cho YA, Moon SH, Kim TH, Park JW, Lee JW, Choe JY, Kim MJ, Kim SE. High cellular prion protein expression in cholangiocarcinoma: A marker for early postoperative recurrence and unfavorable prognosis. World J Gastrointest Surg 2025; 17(3): 101940 [DOI: 10.4240/wjgs.v17.i3.101940]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Sung-Eun Kim, MD, PhD, Department of Internal Medicine, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, No. 22 Gwanpyeong-ro 170 beon-gil, Dongan-gu, Anyang 14068, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. sekim@hallym.or.kr
Research Domain of This Article
Medicine, Research & Experimental
Article-Type of This Article
Retrospective Study
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Gastrointest Surg. Mar 27, 2025; 17(3): 101940 Published online Mar 27, 2025. doi: 10.4240/wjgs.v17.i3.101940
High cellular prion protein expression in cholangiocarcinoma: A marker for early postoperative recurrence and unfavorable prognosis
Dong Woo Shin, Yoon Ah Cho, Sung-Hoon Moon, Tae Hyung Kim, Ji-Won Park, Jung-Woo Lee, Ji-Young Choe, Min-Jeong Kim, Sung-Eun Kim
Dong Woo Shin, Sung-Hoon Moon, Tae Hyung Kim, Ji-Won Park, Sung-Eun Kim, Department of Internal Medicine, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, Anyang 14068, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
Yoon Ah Cho, Department of Pathology and Translational Genomics, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul 06351, South Korea
Jung-Woo Lee, Department of Surgery, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, Anyang 14068, South Korea
Ji-Young Choe, Anatomic Pathology Reference Lab, Seegene Medical Foundation, Seoul 04805, South Korea
Min-Jeong Kim, Department of Radiology, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, Anyang 14068, South Korea
Co-first authors: Dong Woo Shin and Yoon Ah Cho.
Author contributions: Shin DW and Cho YA contributed equally to this manuscript as co-first authors. Shin DW and Kim SE contributed to the conceptualization and methodology, and writing-review and editing of this manuscript; Choe JY participated in the data collection; Cho YA took part in the construction of tissue microarray of this study, interpretation of the data and contributed to writing and revising the manuscript; Park JW and Kim MJ contributed to the data acquisition and analysis; Shin DW and Lee JW contributed to the data analysis and visualization; Shin DW and Moon SH contributed to the software and writing-original draft; Kim SE contributed to the supervision. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript before submission.
Supported by National Research Foundation of Korea Grant Funded by the Korea Government, No. RS-2023-00213951.
Institutional review board statement: The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital (No. HALLYM IRB 2022-03-012-001).
Informed consent statement: Given the study’s retrospective design using anonymized clinical data, the requirement for informed consent was waived by the Institutional Review Board of Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Sung-Eun Kim, MD, PhD, Department of Internal Medicine, Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, No. 22 Gwanpyeong-ro 170 beon-gil, Dongan-gu, Anyang 14068, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. sekim@hallym.or.kr
Received: October 2, 2024 Revised: November 25, 2024 Accepted: January 6, 2025 Published online: March 27, 2025 Processing time: 144 Days and 21.7 Hours
Abstract
BACKGROUND
The cellular prion protein (PrPC), traditionally associated with neurodegenerative disorders, plays an important role in cancer progression and metastasis by inhibiting apoptosis.
AIM
To investigate the influence of PrPC expression in cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) on patient outcomes following surgical resection.
METHODS
Patients who underwent curative surgical resection for either intrahepatic or hilar CCA were enrolled in this retrospective study. Based on the immunohistochemical staining results of the surgical specimens, patients were categorized into two groups: The low PrPC group (negative or 1+) and the high PrPC group (2+ or 3+). Survival analyses, including overall survival and recurrence-free survival, were conducted using the Kaplan-Meier method and compared using the log-rank test.
RESULTS
In total, seventy-six patients diagnosed with CCA (39 with intrahepatic and 37 with hilar CCA) underwent curative hepatectomy from January 2011 to November 2021. Among these patients, 38 (50%) demonstrated high PrPC expression, whereas the remaining 38 (50%) showed low expression of PrPC. During a median follow-up period of 31.2 months (range: 1 to 137 months), the high PrPC group had a significantly shorter median overall survival than the low PrPC group (40.4 months vs 137.9 months, respectively; P = 0.041). Moreover, the high PrPC group had a significantly shorter median recurrence-free survival than the low PrPC group (13.3 months vs 23.8 months, respectively; P = 0.026).
CONCLUSION
PrPC expression is significantly associated with early recurrence and decreased survival period in CCA patients following surgical resection. Thus, PrPC may be used as a prognostic factor in treatment planning.
Core Tip: High cellular prion protein (PrPC) expression is significantly associated with early recurrence and decreased survival period in cholangiocarcinoma patients following surgical resection. PrPC expression serves as an independent prognostic factor for overall survival and recurrence-free survival. These findings suggest that PrPC could be a valuable prognostic biomarker following curative surgery.
