KIAA1522 is a novel prognostic biomarker in patients with non-small cell lung cancer.

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Cancer Statistics 2015 reported that more than 221,200 new cases of lung cancer are detected and approximately 158,040 people die of the disease in the United States, which represent 13.3% of all new cancer cases and 26.8% of cancer deaths in this population1. In China, mortality from lung cancer has increased by 465% during the past 30 years2. Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and adenocarcinoma (ADC) of the lung are the most common subtypes. Nearly 70% of patients will be diagnosed with advanced disease that is not amenable to curative therapy3. Counting on all stages, only about 17% patients could survive beyond 5 years. Increasing evidences suggest a significant role for biomarkers in evaluation of patient prognosis with NSCLC4,5,6. At present, most discoveries of biomarkers for NSCLCs are focused on the individual gene with known functions or a panel of genes within specific functional groups7,8,9,10,11, while few genes with uncharacterized biological or molecular functions are studied for their prognostic value, leaving this type of genes out of the usage as biomarkers. To evaluate the feasibility of uncharacterized genes/proteins as biomarkers for NSCLC and to identify novel prognostic and predictive biomarkers from this subset of genes, we explored a screening approach to search uncharacterized genes which are aberrantly expressed in NSCLC tissues and may play potential prognostic roles in patients with NSCLC. KIAA1522 is an uncharacterized gene screened out by this approach. However, the clinical significance of the protein remains to be unveiled. There have been little reports about the functions of KIAA1522, besides several high-throughput screening methods hit this gene without further investigation12,13,14. In our previous study, we have shown that a six-protein panel containing KIAA1522 could act as diagnostic marker in the bronchial brushing specimens of the patients with lung cancer15. The examination of KIAA1522 following screened out by our approach in the tumor tissue samples may extend the range of utility of this protein as a biomarker in lung cancer patients. Here, we show that the gene of KIAA1522 is aberrantly high expression in the NSCLC tissues and functions as a prognostic biomarkers indicating poor survival of NSCLC patients.