Clinical Trials Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2023. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jul 14, 2023; 29(26): 4200-4213
Published online Jul 14, 2023. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v29.i26.4200
Raf kinase inhibitor protein combined with phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase offers valuable prognosis in gastrointestinal stromal tumor
Wen-Zhi Qu, Luan Wang, Juan-Juan Chen, Yang Wang
Wen-Zhi Qu, Yang Wang, Department of General Surgery, The 4th Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang 110032, Liaoning Province, China
Luan Wang, Department of Emergency, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang 110004, Liaoning Province, China
Juan-Juan Chen, Department of Medical Service, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang 110004, Liaoning Province, China
Author contributions: Wang Y designed research; Wang Y, Wang L and Qu WZ performed research; Wang Y and Qu WZ analyzed data; Wang Y, Chen JJ and Wang L wrote the paper; Wang Y edited the paper and provided primary revised opinion; All authors have read and approve the final manuscript.
Supported by Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province, No.2020-MS-148.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the 4th Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University’s Institutional Review Board, No. EC-2020-KS-015.
Informed consent statement: Consent was not obtained but the presented data are anonymized, and risk of identification is low. With the approval of the ethics committee, informed consent was waived.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors report grants from Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province, China, during the conduct of the study. We declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted and entitled 'Raf kinase inhibitor protein combined with phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase offers valuable prognosis in gastrointestinal stromal tumor'.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code, and dataset available from the corresponding author at wwyy840731@126.com. Consent was not obtained but the presented data are anonymized, and risk of identification is low. No additional data are available.
CONSORT 2010 statement: The authors have read the CONSORT 2010 statement, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the CONSORT 2010 statement.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Yang Wang, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Doctor, Department of General Surgery, The 4th Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, No. 4 Chongshan Road, Huanggu District, Shenyang 110032, Liaoning Province, China. wwyy840731@126.com
Received: April 24, 2023
Peer-review started: April 24, 2023
First decision: May 16, 2023
Revised: May 20, 2023
Accepted: June 2, 2023
Article in press: June 2, 2023
Published online: July 14, 2023
ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS
Research background

Nowadays, research reports on the important clinical and prognostic value of phosphorylated-extracellular signal-regulated kinase (P-ERK) and phosphorylated-mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK/ERK) kinase (P-MEK) proteins closely related to raf kinase inhibitor protein (RKIP) have gradually emerged in digestive tract tumors.

Research motivation

The expression of downstream proteins of the ERK/MAPK pathway combined with RKIP in gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) is scarce.

Research objectives

To detect the expression of RKIP, P-ERK, and P-MEK proteins in GIST and to analyze their relationship with clinicopathological characteristics and prognosis of this disease. Try to establish a new prognosis evaluation model using RKIP and P-ERK in combination and analyze its prognosis evaluation efficacy.

Research methods

This study will focus on this aspect and use immunohistochemistry methods, large sample survival analysis data, and the latest bioinformatics analysis techniques to search for answers to the problem.

Research results

Our experimental results showed that the expression of RKIP and P-ERK proteins in GIST was associated with tumor size, NIH 2008 staging, tumor invasion, and P-ERK expression was also related to mitotic count. The expression of the two proteins had a certain negative correlation.

Research conclusions

The combined expression of RKIP and P-ERK proteins can serve as an independent risk factor for predicting the prognosis of GIST patients. The new risk assessment model incorporating RKIP and P-ERK has superior evaluation efficacy and is worth further practical application to validate.

Research perspectives

As one of the hotspots, our study found that the combination of RKIP and P-ERK proteins can effectively indicate the prognosis of GIST and can be used to guide GIST targeted therapy. More researches are needed to focus on the application and exploration of RKIP and P-ERK proteins in tumor diagnosis and treatment.