Mohammad Ghodsi - Center Of Pathological And Medical Diagnostic Services, Iranian Academic Center For Education, Culture & Research (ACECR), Mashhad Branch, Mashhad, Iran
Farzaneh Motiei Bahabadi - Department Of Biology, Islamic Azad University, Damghan, Iran
Mohammad Mahdi Forghanifard - Avicenna Research Institute, Mashhad, Iran

Gastric cancer (GC) as the fourth most common cause of malignancies shows high rate of morbidity appropriating the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Developmental pluripotencyassociated-2 (DPPA2), cancer-testis antigen (CT100), is commonly expressed only in the human germ line and pluripotent embryonic cells but it is also present in a significant subset of malignant tumors.To investigate whether or not DPPA2 expression is recalled in GC, our aim in this study was to elucidate DPPA2 protein expression in gastric cancer. Fifty five GC tumor and their related margin normal tissues were recruited to evaluate DPPA2 protein expression and its probable associations with different clinicopathological features of the patients. DPPA2 was overexpressed in GC cases comparedwith normal tissues (P < .005). While DPPA2 expression was detected in all GC samples, its high expression was found in 23 of 55 tumor tissues (41.8%). Interestingly, 50 of 55 normal samples (90.9%)were negative for DPPA2 protein expression and remained 5 samples showed very low expression of DPPA2. DPPA2 protein expression in GC was significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis (p= 0.012). The clinical relevance of DPPA2 in GC illustrated that high level expression of this protein was associated with lymph node metastasis supporting this hypothesis that alteration in DPPA2 wasassociated with aggressiveness of gastric cancer and may be an early event in progression of the disease. DPPA2 may be introduced as a new marker for invasive and metastatic GCs

Gastric Cancer, Gene and Cancer, Cell and Cancer, Cancer Treatment and Management,Targeted Cancer Therapy