Clinical significance of Hiwi gene expression in gliomas

Piwi, highly conserved during evolution, has been reported to play a key role in stem cell self-renewal in several different organisms. As one of the four human homologues of the Piwi family, Hiwi has been demonstrated to be significantly overexpressed in some human cancer. However, the relationship between Hiwi and human gliomas is unclear. In this study, we investigated the clinical significance of Hiwi in human gliomas. Hiwi was found to be specifically expressed in the majority of glioma tissues, and the expression was greatly increased with the ascending of tumor grades. In addition, it was statistically significant that the patients with high Hiwi positive had poorer outcome than the patients with low Hiwi positive. Our results suggest that Hiwi may be a critical factor in glioma progression and could be used as a potential molecular marker for pathological diagnosis and prognosis evaluation for malignant gliomas. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.