The Expression And Clinical Significance Of SLC3A2 In Oral Potentially Malignant Disorders And Oral Squamous Cell Carcinomas

Oral squamous cell carcinoma(OSCC)is a common malignant tumor.The early detection of OSCC is of great importance to reduce the mortality related to the disease.Many cases of OSCC come from oral potentially malignant disorders(OPMD),and thus it is imperative to constantly monitor the OPMD patients.Saliva is an enormous repository for biomarkers,which has the outstanding advantage of being non-invasive.Objectives:This study was designed to identify and pre-validate a set of salivary proteins that can differentiate OSCC patients from healthy individuals and OPMD patients.Subjects and methods:(1)Proteomes of 60 saliva specimens from healthy individuals,OPMD patients,and OSCC patients were analyzed by the isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation(i TRAQ)method.(2)Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay(ELISA)was used to verify the candidate biomarkers and analyze the associations between the salivary levels of these biomarkers and clinicopathological features in an independent sample set(n=90).Receiver operating characteristic(ROC)curves were used to evaluate diagnostic value of these biomarkers.(3)Immunohistochemistry was performed to detect the expression of SLC3A2 in OSCC tissue,OPMD tissue and normal oral mucosal tissue.The associations between the tissular level of SLC3A2 and clinicopathological features were also analyzed.Results:(1)Totally,246 differentially expressed proteins were discovered by comparison of each two groups,and 21 proteins were differentially expressed in the OSCC group compared with both the control group and the OPMD group.SLC3A2,S100A2 and IL1 RN were selected to pre-validate.(2)The ELISA data indicated that the salivary levels of SLC3A2 and S100A2 in OSCC patients were upregulated and the salivary level of IL1 RN was downregulated.The high level of SLC3A2 was related to tumor size.Besides,the high level of S100A2 was associated with cervical nodal metastasis and advanced clinical stage.(3)The immunohistochemistry data suggested SLC3A2 was upregulated in the OSCC tissue.The tissular level of SLC3A2 was associated with tumor size.Conclusion:Our study indicates that the salivary levels of SLC3A2,S100A2 and IL1 RN are promising for long-term monitoring of OPMD patients and early detection of OSCC.