High GP73 Expression Correlates With Poor Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy and Survival in Gastric Cancer: A Tissue Microarray Study

Golgi protein 73 (GP73) is a type II Golgi transmembrane protein which is overexpressed in several cancers, however, its role in gastric cancer is still unclear. The aim of this study is to investigate if high GP73 expression is associated with pathological tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and prognosis for patients with gastric cancer. A total of 348 patients with gastric cancer, who had undergone surgery between 1999 and 2011 were retrospectively reviewed, GP73 expression was examined in tumor tissues using tissue microarray and the correlations between its expression and pathological response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy as well as patients prognosis were analyzed. We found that GP73 expression was not associated with clinicopathologic features including tumor size, differentiation and TNM stage. High expression of GP73 was associated with less pathological tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and poor survival in gastric cancer, multivariate analysis showed GP73 expression was an independent predictive factor for pathological response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and for prognosis in patients with gastric cancer. Our results suggest that GP73 expression correlates with the effect of neoadjuvant chemotherapy and is a promising biomarker to identify patients with poor prognosis.