Clinical Significance Of TEAD4 Expression In Human Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Esophageal cancer (EC), is one of the lethal malignancies worldwide due to its intensely aggressivenature and poor survival rate of patients. Cell signaling pathways are strongly considered in tumorprogression and development. Hippo signaling pathway controls organ size in animals throughregulates cell proliferation and apoptosis as well as progression of different malignancies includinggastric, breast, lung and colorectal cancers. TEAD4, as the main transcription factor of this pathwaybinds specifically to the YAP1 oncoprotein and induces transcription of related target genes. Ouraim in this study was to examine TEAD4 mRNA expression in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma(ESCC) and evaluate its correlation with different clinicopathological features of the patients.ThemRNA expression of TEAD4 was evaluated using Real-time PCR in 50 fresh-frozen tumoral andrelated margin-n ormal tissues. Data was analyzed using the SPSS 19.9 statistical package.Significant over expression of TEAD4 was observed in 44% of tumor samples. Mean ± SD of geneexpression fold change was 1.8412 ± 2.02479. The expression of TEAD4 was directly associated withthe stage of tumor cell progression and lymph node metastasis (p≤0.05). Our findings suggest thatTEAD4 has markedly different expression pattern in ESCC compared to normal tissues andoverexpression of TEAD4 is likely to have important roles in ESCC progression. These findingsidentify, TEAD4 as a marker of ESCC invasiveness and thus may be useful as a prognostic andtherapeutic target for improving survival rate of patients.