Expression of Sox2 in cervical squamous cell carcinoma.

PURPOSE: Sox2, one of the genes that maintains self-renewal of embryonic stem cells and relates to the differentiation potential of these cells, is abnormaly expressed in various human tumors. We investigated the expression Sox2 in normal cervix and cervical squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), and we also assessed the prognostic significance of Sox2 expression in FIGO stage I-II cervical SCC.

METHODS

Immunohistochemistry was performed to define the expression of Sox2 in 20 normal cervical tissue samples and 55 samples of cervical SCC. Correlations with clinicopathological characteristics were determined by chi-square test. The prognostic impact of Sox2 expression with regard to overall disease-free survival (DFS) was determined by the Kaplan-Meier method.

RESULTS

The positive expression rate in cervical SCC was 74.5% (41/55), while in normal cervix it was 20.0% (4/20; p=0.000. In addition, the expression of Sox2 did not correlate with clinical factors (p>0.05). The overall DFS rates with negative and positive expressions of Sox2 were 35.7 and 29.3%, respectively (p=0.360).

CONCLUSIONS

Our results show that Sox2 was overexpressed in FIGO stage I-II cervical SCC, indicating that overexpressed Sox2 may play an important role in the carcinogenesis of cervical SCC. Besides, we found that the expression of Sox2 had no relation to clinical factors and prognosis.