Retrospective Cohort Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2018. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Mar 21, 2018; 24(11): 1228-1238
Published online Mar 21, 2018. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v24.i11.1228
Role of relevant immune-modulators and cytokines in hepatocellular carcinoma and premalignant hepatic lesions
Abdel-Rahman N Zekri, Somaya El Deeb, Abeer A Bahnassy, Abeer M Badr, Mona S Abdellateif, Gamal Esmat, Hosny Salama, Marwa Mohanad, Ahmed Esam El-dien, Shimaa Rabah, Assmaa Abd Elkader
Abdel-Rahman N Zekri, Molecular Virology and Immunology Unit, Department of Cancer Biology, National Cancer Institute, Cairo University, Cairo 11976, Egypt
Somaya El Deeb, Abeer M Badr, Ahmed Esam El-dien, Shimaa Rabah, Assmaa Abd Elkader, Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Cairo University, Giza 12613, Egypt
Abeer A Bahnassy, Department of Pathology, National Cancer Institute, Cairo University, Cairo 11976, Egypt
Mona S Abdellateif, Medical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Department of Cancer Biology, National Cancer Institute, Cairo University, Cairo 11976, Egypt
Gamal Esmat, Hosny Salama, Department of Hepatology and Tropical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo 11441, Egypt
Marwa Mohanad, Department of Biochemistry, Misr University for Science and Technology, 6th October 12945, Giza Governorate, Egypt
Author contributions: Zekri AN was the main supervisor, put forth the idea and planned of work, and performed data interpretation; El Deeb S supervised the biochemical work; Bahnassy AA supervised the flow cytometry work and revised the paper; Badr AM revised the paper; Abdellateif MS analyzed the data and wrote the paper; Esmat G and Salama H performed the medical care and the follow-up of patients; Mohanad M analyzed the data; El-dien AE performed the immunophenotyping; Rabah S and Abd Elkader A performed the ELISA work.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved for publication by our Institutional Reviewer.
Informed consent statement: All study participants or their legal guardian provided informed written consent about personal and medical data collection prior to study enrolment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors have no conflict of interest related to the manuscript.
Data sharing statement: The original anonymized dataset is available on request from the corresponding author at ncizekri@yahoo.com.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (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: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Abdel-Rahman N Zekri, MSc, PhD, Professor, Molecular Virology and Immunology Unit, Department of Cancer Biology, National Cancer Institute, Cairo University, Kasr Al-Aini Street, Fom El-Khaleeg, Cairo 11976, Egypt. ncizekri@yahoo.com
Telephone: +2-10-01413521 Fax: +2-202-23644720
Received: November 5, 2017
Peer-review started: November 6, 2017
First decision: November 27, 2017
Revised: December 24, 2017
Accepted: January 16, 2018
Article in press: January 16, 2018
Published online: March 21, 2018
Processing time: 130 Days and 19.8 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: We assessed the levels of different immune modulatory cytokines and innate immune cells as natural killer (NK) cells and dendritic cells (DCs) in patients with disease progression of hepatocarcinogenesis. Our results showed significant down-regulation in active mDCs and pDCs expressing CD40 as well as NK cells expressing NKG2D. The expression of NKG2D on NKs was not expressed in 63% of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. Also, there was significant decrease of interleukin (IL)-2, interferon-α and interferon-γ, and a significant increase in IL-10, IL-1β, and TNF-αR2 in HCC patients. These factors could be implicated in the pathogenesis of HCC, and represent attractive targets for therapy in chronic hepatitis C virus hepatitis and HCC.