Clinical significance of Galectin-3 in clear cell renal cell carcinoma

Overexpression of galectin-3 in a variety of cancer cell lines has been shown
to correlate with tumor progression and metastasis. In this study, we investigated the
expression of galectin-3 in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (CC-RCC) and evaluated the
relationship between galectin-3 expression levels and the clinicopathological features
of CC-RCC. Expression of galectin-3 in the kidney cancer cell lines Caki-1, Caki-2, A704,
ACHN and KPK-1 were evaluated using western blot analysis, while galectin-3 expression
in CC-RCC tissues and normal parenchyma were measured by real-time PCR and
immunohistochemistry. We found that galectin-3 was overexpressed in the Caki-1, Caki-
2, A704, ACHN and KPK-1 cell lines and that the expression level in CC-RCC was also
significantly higher than that in renal parenchyma obtained from the same patient samples
(p=0.039). Galectin-3 expression in CC-RCC with distant metastasis was also significantly
higher than that in CC-RCC without distant metastasis (p=0.045). In conclusion,
we revealed that galectin-3 is highly expressed in CC-RCC, especially in CC-RCC
with distant metastasis, suggesting that galectin-3 may serve as a novel target molecule
for predicting CC-RCC metastasis.

The journal of medical investigation : http://medical.med.tokushima-u.ac.jp/jmi/index.html