Background and Aim: Ovarian cancer is one of the commonest malignant tumors in women in Egypt and considered to be the leading cause of death from such gynecological malignancies. In some studies, ovarian tumors that had a combined expression of Her-2/neu and Snail were found to be resistant to anti-Her2/neu therapeutic agents. Hence there may be a relationship between Her2neu/and epithelial –mesenchymal markers responsible for drug resistance and tumor metastasis.
The aim in this study was to evaluate the immunohistochemical expression of Snail and Her2/neu in ovarian serous neoplasm and correlate their expressions with each other and with different clincopathological variables to detect the usefulness of these markers in progression and planning of therapeutic strategies of such tumors.
Materials and methods: Forty paraffin embedded tissue blocks from ovarian serous lesion (7 benign serous tumors, 11 borderline serous tumors and 22 ovarian serous carcinoma) were immunohistochemically studied for Snail and Her/2neu expression.
Results: High nuclear expression of Snail was detected in 27.2% (3/11) and 54.5% (12/22) of the studied borderline and malignant serous carcinomas respectively and showed progressively more increase in expression in invasive tumors as compared to borderline tumor. Snail overexpression was statistically significant with FIGO stage, lymph node metastasis, and presence of intraperitoneal implants of the studied carcinoma cases (p=0.043, p |
