Survivin as a Prognostic Factor for Osteosarcoma Patients

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Purpose: Survivin is one of the apoptosis inhibitor genes and is rarely expressed in adult tissues. However, survivin expression has been detected in various human cancers and correlations have been recognized between the level of expression of this gene in tumors and prognosis. In this study, we investigated the correlations between survivin mRNA expression in osteosarcoma tissues and clinicopathological parameters.
Methods: There were 22 osteosarcoma patients in our hospital with paraffin-embedded tissues which could be extracted from biopsy specimens. We used the RT-PCR method after extracting total RNA and conducted a densitometric analysis to determine the ratio of survivin relative to h-GAPDH as an internal marker.
Results: Expression of survivin mRNA was detected in all osteosarcoma samples. Patients with metastasis had high survivin mRNA levels in initial biopsy specimens (p<0.01). Moreover, there was a statistically significant difference in survivin mRNA expression between patients with and without metastasis (p<0.01).
Conclusion: We concluded that high levels of survivin mRNA expression suggest poor prognosis for osteosarcoma patients.