Overexpression of HMGA2 Promotes Metastasis and Impacts Survival of Colorectal Cancers

Purpose: This study aims to address the hypothesis that the high-mobility group A2 (HMGA2), an oncofetal protein, relates to survivability and serves as a prognostic biomarker for colorectal cancer (CRC). Experimental Design: This is a retroprospective multiple center study. The HMGA2 expression level was determined by performing immunohistochemistry on surgical tissue samples of 89 CRCs from a training set and 191 CRCs from a validation set. The Kaplan–Meier analysis and COX proportional hazard model were employed to analyze the survivability. Results: Multivariate logistic analysis indicated that the expression of HMGA2 significantly correlates with distant metastasis in training set (odds ratio, OR = 3.53, 95% CI: 1.37–9.70) and validation set (OR = 6.38, 95% CI: 1.47–43.95). Survival analysis revealed that the overexpression of HMGA2 is significantly associated with poor survival of CRC patients ( P Conclusion: Overexpression of HMGA2 is associated with metastasis and unequivocally occurred in parallel with reduced survival rates of patients with CRC. Therefore, HMGA2 may potentially serve as a biomarker for predicting aggressive CRC with poor survivability and as an indicator for better response of radiotherapy. Clin Cancer Res; 17(8); 2570–80. ©2011 AACR .