Research Article Overexpression of Testes-Specific Protease 50 (TSP50) Predicts Poor Prognosis in Patients with Gastric Cancer

Copyright © 2014 Fang Liu et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Purpose. To investigate the expression of TSP50 protein in human gastric cancers and its correlation with clinical/prognostic significance.Methods. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) analysis of TSP50 was performed on a tissue microarray (TMA) containing 334 primary gastric cancers.Western blotwas carried out to confirm the expression of TSP50 in gastric cancers.Results. IHC analysis revealed high expression of TSP50 in 57.2 % human gastric cancer samples (191 out of 334). However, it was poorly expressed in all of the 20 adjacent nontumor tissues.This was confirmed bywestern blot, which showed significantly higher levels of TSP50 expression in gastric cancer tissues than adjacent nontumor tissues. A significant association was found between high levels of TSP50 and clinicopathological characteristics including junior age at surgery