IL-13Rα2 gene expression is a biomarker of adverse outcome in patients with adrenocortical carcinoma

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 16; no. 2; p. e0246632
• Main Authors: Kumar, Abhinav, Bellayr, Ian H., Singh, Hridaya S., Puri, Raj K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 01.02.2021; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adrenal glands; Age; Allergies; Apoptosis; Biological products; Biology and Life Sciences; Biomarkers; Biotechnology; Cancer vaccines; Cell division; Datasets; Disease; Editing; Gene expression; Gene therapy; Genomes; Genomics; Head & neck cancer; Hypersensitivity; Infectious diseases; Interleukin 13; Kidney cancer; Ligands; Malignancy; Medical prognosis; Medicine and Health Sciences; Metastasis; Mortality; Mortality risk; Mutation; Neuroendocrine tumors; Patients; Signal transduction; Survival analysis; Tumors; Vaccines; Zoology; United States > US; Maryland
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246632

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare but aggressive endocrine malignancy that usually results in a fatal outcome. To allow the better clinical management and reduce mortality, we searched for clinical and molecular markers that are reliable predictor of disease severity and clinical outcome in ACC patients. We determined a correlation between the overexpression of IL-13R α2 and the clinical outcome in ACC patients using comprehensive data available in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. The dataset of 79 ACC subjects were divided into groups of low, medium, or high expression of IL-13R α2 as determined by RNA-seq. These patients were also stratified by length of survival, overall survival, incidence of a new tumor event, incidence of metastasis, and production of excess hormones. We report a correlation between IL-13R α2 expression and survival of subjects with ACC. High expression of IL-13Rα 2 in ACC tumors was significantly associated with a lower patient survival rate and period of survival compared to low expression (p = 0.0084). In addition, high IL-13R α2 expression was significantly associated with a higher incidence of new tumor events and excess hormone production compared to low or medium IL-13R α2 expression. Within the cohort of patients that produced excess hormone, elevated IL-13R α2 expression was significantly associated with a lower survival rate. Additionally, IL-13R α1 had a potential relationship between transcript level and ACC survival. Our results and promising antitumor activity in preclinical models and trials indicate that IL-13R α2 expression is an important prognostic biomarker of ACC disease outcome and a promising target for therapeutic treatment of ACC.