ALCAM is a biomarker of tumor aggressiveness and worse prognosis in glottic laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma.

Abstract

Laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) is the second most frequent head and neck tumor. Prognosis of patients with LSCC has not improved in recent decades, showing a need for the identification of prognostic biomarkers and new therapeutic targets. Recently, we showed that ALCAM overexpression was associated with glottic LSCC prognosis. Aiming to validate the prognostic value of ALCAM, we evaluate the ALCAM protein levels by immunohistochemistry in 263 glottic LSCC surgically treated with neck dissection. ALCAM was expressed in 48.7% and overexpressed in 36.5% of glottic LSCC samples. ALCAM overexpression was associated with lymph node metastasis (p = 0.030), lymphovascular involvement (p = 0.0002), high-grade tumors (p = 0.025), and tumor relapse (p = 0.043). Multivariate survival analyses showed an overfitting between ALCAM overexpression and lymph node metastasis as a prognostic variable. High ALCAM expression was associated with an aggressive glottic LSCC profile.