The prognostic value of ephrin type-A2 receptor and Ki-67 in renal cell carcinoma patients: An Immunohistochemical and Bioinformatical Approach; A STROBE - compliant article

Patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the most common malignant renal epithelial tumor, usually present with advanced disease and unpredicted clinical behavior. The receptor tyrosine kinase, ephrin type-A receptor 2 (EphA2) was found to be overexpressed in several malignancies and its expression was found to be associated with poor prognostic features.Our study is an observational study with the aim of investigating the prognostic value of EphA2 in RCC patients and its association with clinicopathological parameters as well as Ki-67 expression, which is a well-known proliferative and prognostic marker in RCC.EphA2 and Ki-67 immunohistochemical staining was performed on whole sections representative of 50 patients diagnosed with primary RCC from 2013 to 2018. In addition, the association between EphA2 mRNA expression and clinicopathological parameters as well as the patients' outcome was also evaluated using two large publicly available databases.Our results showed a significant association between EphA2 immunohistochemical expression and tumor size, nuclear grade, tumor stage, patients' outcome and Ki-67 expression (P