Expression of Gli1 and Wnt2B correlates with progression and clinical outcome of pancreatic cancer

The aim of this study was to investigate the expression and clinical significance of Gli1 and Wnt2B in pancreatic cancer. We have constructed a formalin-fixed paraffin embedded pancreatic tissue microarrays 180 cylindrical tissue cores of human pancreatic cancer and its paracancerous nonmalignant pancreatic specimens (NMPs) from 90 patients. Levels of Gli1 and Wnt2B were measured by immunohistochemistry. We analyzed the correlations between the expression of these factors and clinicopathological parameters including prognosis. The expressions of both Gli1 and Wnt2B in human pancreatic cancer tissues were significantly higher than those of normal pancreatic tissues (P=0.000, P=0.004 respectively). The analysis showed that the high cytoplasmic expression levels of Gli1 in pancreatic cancer tissues had significant correlation with lymph node metastasis (P=0.036) and Wnt2B had significant correlation with perineural invasion (P=0.045). Gli1 and Wnt2B have no positive correlation. Survival analysis by Kaplan-Meier demonstrated that elevated Wnt2B expression in cancer tissue predicted worse overall survival (OS) compared with group in lower expression (P=0.024). No correlation was found between the expression of Gli1 and overall survival of pancreatic cancer patients (P>0.05). In conclusion, these results indicate that the high-expression levels of Gli1 and Wnt2B might play a pivotal role during tumorigenesis of pancreatic cancer, and the high expression of Wnt2B might be associated with poor prognosis.