Expression And Significance Of Livin And Its Relation To Ki-67 In Bladder Transitional Cell Carcinomas

Objective: Livin, a novel member of inhibitor of apoptosis protein (IAP) family, is highly expressed in most tumor tissues, including melanoma, colon cancer, mammary cancer, cancer of the cervix, leukemia and lymphoma, and carcinoma as of bladder, stomach, and prostate. But livin was not detectable in most normal adult tissues with the exception of the placenta. Our work is to study the expression of livin in BTCC (the bladder transitional cell carcinomas) and its relationship between with tissue pathology grade, stage, relapse and expression of Ki-67 in BTCC.Methods: 36 bladder transitional cell carcinomas and 8 normal bladder mucosas were used to detect the expressions of livin and Ki-67 by immunohistochemistry.Results: In the present study we evaluated by immunohistochemistry the presence of livin expression in 8 normal and in 36 cancerous bladder tissues. In normal tissues, no detectable level of livin was detected. Among tumor tissues, 31/36 (86.1%) showed expression of livin. The positive rate of livin was not associated with pathological grades, clinical stages and recurrent or not in BTCC (p>0.05). The positive rate in gradeâ… ,â…¡,â…¢are 83.3%, 100.0%, 75.0%,in stage of Tis~T1, T2~T4 are 95.2%, 78.6%; In primary and recurrent cases are 88.9%, 83.3%, respectively. There is no significant relationship between livin and Ki-67 expression.Conclusions: The up-regulated expression of livin in BTCC suggests that livin plays an important role in tumor occurrence and progress through inhibiting cell apoptosis. It seems that livin is not related to cell proliferation and cell cycle. Therefore, we concluded that livin might be the index for identifying of BTCC. Livin can provide new appropriate target for immunotherapy to BTCC.