Polypeptide N-acetylgalactosaminyltransferase-6 expression independently predicts poor overall survival in patients with lung adenocarcinoma after curative resection

Background: Polypeptide N-acetylgalactosaminyltransferases (GalNAc-Ts) are important glycosyltransferases in cancer, but the clinical role of its individual isoforms is unclear. We investigated the clinical significance and survival relevance of one isoform, GalNAc-T6 in lung adenocarcinoma after curative resection. Results: GalNAc-T6 was identified in 27.8% (55/198) of patients, and statistically indicated advanced TNM stage (P = 0.069). Multivariate analysis showed GalNAc-T6 to be an independent predictor for reduced overall survival of patients (P = 0.027), and the result was confirmed with bootstraping techniques, and on line Kaplan-Meier Plotter and SurvExpress database analysis, respectively. Moreover, ROC curve demonstrated that GalNAc-T6 expression significantly improved the accuracy of survival prediction. Methods: With 198 paraffin-embedded tumor samples from lung adenocarcinoma patients, GalNAc-T6 expression was immunohistochemically assessed for the association with clinicopathological parameters. The prognostic significance was evaluated by Cox proportional hazards regression analysis with 1000 bootstraping. Kaplan-Meier Plotter, SurvExpress database analysis, and receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve were performed to provide further validation. Conclusions: GalNAc-T6 expression correlated significantly with advanced TNM stage, and independently predicted worse OS for lung adenocarcinoma.