Recent studies have shown that cancer cells can deceive phagocytosing macrophage cells through the CD47 protein which gives the message “don’t eat me” or “don’t kill me” to immune components. The efficacy of anti-CD47 treatment approach was shown in cancers such as, non-small
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Recent studies have shown that cancer cells can deceive phagocytosing macrophage cells through the CD47 protein which gives the message “don’t eat me” or “don’t kill me” to immune components. The efficacy of anti-CD47 treatment approach was shown in cancers such as, non-small cell lung cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, ovarian cancer, and breast cancer. The studies on the immunobiology of neuroblastoma has increased as monoclonal antibody based immunotherapy has shown to be effective in high-risk patients such as anti disialoganglioside. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the levels of CD47 protein expression among neuroblastoma patients with different risk groups and genetic alterations. This study included paraffin-embedded tumor tissues of 66 neuroblastoma patients (28 girls, 38 boys) with an age range of 0.5 to 108 months with a mean value of 24.9 (±23.5). According to risk classifications 21 were at low risk (31, 8%), 24 were at intermediate risk (36, 4%) and 19 were at high-risk (28, 8%) groups. These samples were evaluated for MYCN amplification, 1p36 LOH, 11q23 deletion and 17q25 gain by real-time PCR. In addition, CD47 expression status (positive or negative) was detected by immunohistochemical analysis. All data was analyzed with Chi-Square and Mann-Whitney U non-parametric tests within SPSS program, version 22.0.
p value lower than 0, 5 was found statistically significant. According to the results, patients at low risk did not express CD47, while patients at high-risk group were mostly expressing CD47 (
p = 0.049). MYCN amplification positive patients were expressing CD47 protein (
p = 0.046). Patients without 17q25 gain were found to be expressing CD47 protein (
p = 0.006). In addition, CD47 expression was increasing as age was getting higher in terms of months (
p = 0.018). The findings of this study suggest that positive expression pattern of CD47 may be a poor prognostic biomarker especially in high risk 17q gain negative neuroblastoma patients.
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