Expression and Clinical Significance of Tbx2 in Pancreatic Cancer

Abstract

TBX2 is one of the family of genes encoding developmental transcription factors, characterized by a 200amino acid DNA binding domain (T-box), found to be related to malignant phenotypes of mammary cancer.However, the role of TBX2 in pancreatic cancer progression remains unclear. Therefore, the present study wasconducted to investigate the expression and clinical significance of TBX2 in pancreatic cancer.Immunohistochemistry was carried out on paraffin-embedded sections of pancreatic cancer and normalpancreatic tissues. In addition, semiquantitative RT-PCR and Western blots were carried out to analyze mRNAand protein expression of Tbx2 in 6 pairs of freshly resected pancreatic cancer and their adjacent nontumoroustissue. TBX2 expression was significantly increased in pancreatic cancer tissue (29/48 or 60.4%). The expressionlevel of Tbx2 had a significant positive relationship with tumor differentiation degree, higher TNM stage anddistant metastasis. Also, mRNA and protein expression of Tbx2 were found to be at higher levels in almost allcancer tissues compared to adjacent tissues. In conclusion, Tbx2 protein might play an important role in theprocess of the development and metastasis of pancreatic cancers and high-level Tbx2 expression might be relatedto malignant potential.