Validation of Selected Head and Neck Cancer Prognostic Markers from the Pathology Atlas in an Oral Tongue Cancer Cohort

Abstract

The Pathology Atlas is an open-access database that reports the prognostic value of protein-coding transcripts in 17 cancers, including head and neck cancer. However, cancers of the various head and neck anatomical sites are specific biological entities. Thus, the aim of the present study was to validate promising prognostic markers for head and neck cancer reported in the Pathology Atlas in oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma (OTSCC). We selected three promising markers from the Pathology Atlas (<i>CALML5, CD59, LIMA1</i>), and analyzed their prognostic value in a Norwegian OTSCC cohort comprising 121 patients. We correlated target protein and mRNA expression in formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded cancer tissue to five-year disease-specific survival (DSS) in univariate and multivariate analyses. Protein expression of <i>CALML5</i> and <i>LIMA1</i> were significantly associated with five-year DSS in the OTSCC cohort in univariate analyses (<i>p</i> = 0.016 and <i>p</i> = 0.043, respectively). In multivariate analyses, lymph node metastases, tumor differentiation, and <i>CALML5</i> were independent prognosticators. The prognostic role of the other selected markers for head and neck cancer patients identified through unbiased approaches could not be validated in our OTSCC cohort. This underlines the need for subsite-specific analyses for head and neck cancer.