BIOLOGIC AND CLINICAL CORRELATIONS AMONG PLOIDY, CELL-KINETICS, AND THE TUMOR-ASSOCIATED GLYCOPROTEIN-72 TISSUE EXPRESSION IN COLORECTAL-CANCER - PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to evaluate the possibility of iden tifying biologically aggressive subgroups of patients, combining sever al biologic parameters such as the tumor and normal mucosa values from the ploidy, the S-phase cell percentage, and tumor-associated glycopr otein-72 (TAG-72) expression. METHODS: One hundred five colorectal can cer patients were studied to analyze the possible prognostic role of p loidy and cell kinetics in multiple fresh specimens from the tumor and normal mucosa. Since the presence of TAG-72 in the colonic mucosa has been correlated to neoplastic transformation, the correlations betwee n these parameters and the quantitative tissue expression of the TAG-7 2 were analyzed in a subgroup of 53 cases. RESULTS: A significantly lo wer five-year disease-free survival rate (21.4 percent) was observed i n patients with multiploid tumors, when compared with that observed in patients with diploid or single aneuploid tumors (67.5 percent) (P = 0.03). The quantitative tissue TAG-72 expression contributed in identi fying a particular patient subgroup (20 percent), characterized by S-p hase percentage and TAG-72 values from the normal mucosa that were une xpectedly higher than 12.1 percent and 7.5 U/mg of proteins, respectiv ely. In particular, when the 25 Dukes B patients were analyzed, simila r results were observed. In fact, 14 (56 percent) cases showed high tu mor cell proliferation and, surprisingly, a high tissue TAG-72 content in the normal mucosa was found in 4 (28.6 percent) of these patients. CONCLUSIONS: Other than multiploidy, the biologic aggressiveness of c olorectal cancer might be successfully assessed introducing the evalua tion of new biologic parameters, such as the TAG-72 content and S-phas e percentage values of the normal mucosa, suggesting the possibility o f further stratifying this patient population.