Clinical Significance of ABC Transporter Expression in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma

To gain insight into the clinical significance of expression of ABC transporter antigen in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), we used immunohistochemistry to determine the patterns of ABCB1, ABCC1 and ABCG2 expression in 30 resected HCC tissues, 26 paired adjacent nonneoplastic tissues and 9 cirrhosis tissues accompanied with chronic hepatitis B virus infection in this study. It was found that the expression rates of ABCB1, ABCC1 and ABCG2 were 56.7 %, 93.3 % and 83.3 % in patients with HCC, respectively. ABCB1 and ABCC1 were expressed significantly differently among HCC, adjacent non-neoplastic and cirrhosis tissues. There were no significant differences in the clinical factors associated with the expression of these three ABC transporter antigens. Furthermore, preoperative TACE treatment didn't affect the expression of these three ABC transporters. Moreover, patients with higher expression of both ABCC1 and ABCB1 showed significantly shorter disease-free survival (DFS) than those with lower expression of both antigens (P<0.01). Therefore, higher expression of ABCC1 and ABCB1 might be an unfavorable prognostic factor in patients of HCC, and represent an important hurdle to chemotherapy.