Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Oncol. Aug 15, 2019; 11(8): 589-598
Published online Aug 15, 2019. doi: 10.4251/wjgo.v11.i8.589
SFRP4 expression correlates with epithelial mesenchymal transition-linked genes and poor overall survival in colon cancer patients
Landry E Nfonsam, Jana Jandova, Hunter C Jecius, Pamela N Omesiete, Valentine N Nfonsam
Landry E Nfonsam, Department of Genetics, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Ottawa, Ontario K1H 8L1, Canada
Jana Jandova, Hunter C Jecius, Pamela N Omesiete, Valentine N Nfonsam, Department of Surgery, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85724, United States
Author contributions: Nfonsam LE and Jandova J contributed equally to this work; Nfonsam LE, Jandova J, and Nfonsam VN designed the research; Nfonsam LE, Jandova J, Jecius HC, and Omesiete PN performed the research; Nfonsam LE and Jandova J analyzed and interpreted data; Nfonsam LE, Jandova J, Jecius HC, Omesiete PN, and Nfonsam VN wrote the paper.
Supported by the SAGES research grant (to Nfonsam VN).
Institutional review board statement: This study does not involve human subjects. It utilizes the publicly available de-identified colon adenocarcinoma data set from The Cancer Genome Atlas.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors declare no conflict of interest.
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/
Corresponding author: Valentine N Nfonsam, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, University of Arizona, 1501 N Campbell Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85724, United States. vnfonsam@surgery.arizona.edu
Received: February 14, 2019
Peer-review started: February 15, 2019
First decision: March 14, 2019
Revised: April 2, 2019
Accepted: May 23, 2019
Article in press: May 23, 2019
Published online: August 15, 2019
Core Tip

Core tip: We have previously shown that secreted frizzled-related protein 4 (SFRP4) is over-expressed in colon cancer, especially in patients younger than 50 years. As these early-onset colon cancers tend to be more aggressive and negatively affecting patients’ survival, we sought to evaluate whether SFRP4 is co-expressed with epithelial-mesenchymal transition-linked genes that play key roles in cancer progression. Our results using a large colon adenocarcinoma-The Cancer Genome Atlas cohort revealed that SFRP4 is over-expressed in colon cancer patients together with epithelial-mesenchymal transition-linked genes. Moreover, colon cancer patients with high expression levels of SFRP4 showed significantly poorer survival relative to colon cancer patients with lower SFRP4 expression.