This selleck screening library included five OCT4 studies (564 patients), six SOX2 studies (336 patients), five oestrogen receptor studies (367 patients), seven MET studies (1,015 patients) and 6

Insulin like growth factor receptor studies (764 patients). The years of publication ranged from 1990 to 2012. Figure 1 Flow of included studies. Table 1 Characteristic of the studies included in the systematic review The incidence of OCT4 in SCC was 53.60% (95% CI: 0.182-0.857) and the overall hazard ratio for poor clinic outcome was 2.9 (95% CI: 1.843-4.565). The incidence of SOX2 in SCC was 69.2% Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical (95% CI: 0.361-0.899) however, was associated with significant heterogeneity of 90.94%. The prevalence of ER α and β in SCC were 37.90% (95% CI: 0.317-0.444) and 67.20% (95% CI: 0.314-0.901) respectively. The prevalence Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical of MET in EAC was 33.20% (95% CI: 0.031-0.884) and the incidence

of insulin-like growth factor-1 receptor (IGF-1R) in EAC was 67.70% (95% CI: 0.333-0.898). Heterogeneity and publication bias The heterogeneity of outcomes has been summarized in Table 2. The reason for significant heterogeneity may be attributed Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical to different population groups. No publication bias was detected using the Egger’s regression model. Table 2 Overall odds ratio and 95% CI for patient outcomes Discussion Esophageal cancer is one of the most aggressive neoplasms and the overall prognosis for esophageal cancer patients is poor (64). One of the reasons for the low survival rate is the tumour’s intrinsic resistance to many clinical therapies, especially chemotherapy. Chemotherapy often removes the bulk of a tumour mass without preventing tumour recurrence, suggesting the survival of a subset of cancer stem cells. Studies have provided experimental evidence for the concept that human

tumour growth Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical may depend on a small portion cancer stem cells (65). SOX2 Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and OCT4 The expressions of Oct3/4 and Sox2 were firstly discovered in human esophageal squamous cancer cell lines with the antibody AF1759 and MAB2018 from R&D System for immunocytochemistry. Among 153 specimens from the department of Oncology at Zhengzhou University (66), 105 (68.7%) were negative or weakly positive for OCT4 staining; 21 (13.7%) were moderately positive and 27 (17.6%) were strongly positive. Higher expression level of OCT4 was significantly associated with higher histological grade (P<0.001), indicating its Bay 11-7085 correlation with dedifferentiation of these tumours. The median follow-up time for the 56 patients still alive was 124 months (range, 118-155 months) and for the remaining 97 patients who died during the follow-up period was 61 months (range, 1-139 months). In univariate analysis, patients with low OCT4 expression level in tumours had a better overall survival than patients with tumour showing moderate or high OCT4 expression level (P=0.002 and P<0.001), respectively. Zhou et al. (42) Oct4 protein was expressed in most (93.7%) ESCC samples but it was not observed in esophageal mucosa.