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Evaluation of combined telomerase and c-myc expression in non-small cell lung carcinomas using tissue microarrays and computerized image analysis.

PURPOSE
Telomerase activation plays a crucial role in tumorigenesis by sustaining cellular immortality. It consists of two main components which include a RNA subunit (h-TERC) and a catalytic protein subunit (h-TERT). Similarly, amplification or deletion correlating with overexpression of c-myc is a common event in various neoplasias, including non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC). Because c-myc activates telomerase by inducing expression of its catalytic subunit, our aim was to correlate the expression of these two proteins with the biological behavior in NSCLC.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
Using tissue microarrays technology (TMA) we evaluated by computerized image analysis (CIA) the results of h-TERT and c-myc immuno-histochemistry (IHC) in 40 NSCLCs, which were cored and re-embedded into one TMA block.


RESULTS
Co-overexpression (moderate or high levels of NLI: Nuclear Labeling Index) of h-TERT and c-myc was observed in the majority of cases and found to be statistically significant (p=0.001). The results showed also strong association between c-myc and h-TERT overexpression correlating with stage (p=0.001 for both of them), but not with grade (p=0.206 and p=0.313, respectively).


CONCLUSION
Our combined study showed that there is a strong correlation between the activation and expression of these two genes and maybe this co-deregulation could be used as a prognostic factor for the evaluation of biological behavior in NSCLCs.