BACKGROUNDIntegrin-linked kinase (ILK) is a Ser/Thr protein kinase. Many studies have showed that ILK was closely related to occurrence, proliferation, invasion and metastasis in many malignant tumors, and it appeared to be an upstream cross point of tumor-associated factors. The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between the expression of ILK and some clinical pathological factors in human non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and analyze whether there is relativity between ILK and E-cadherin.

METHODSImmunohistochemical S-P method was adopted to detect the expression of ILK and E-cadherin proteins in 76 NSCLC cases with the neighboring noncancerous tissue, and the expressions of them in 30 fresh NSCLC samples were determined with Western Blot assay.

RESULTSImmunohistochemically, the overexpression of ILK protein in NSCLC was 53/76 (69.7%), including 33/44 (75.0%) squamous cell carcinoma and 20/32 (62.5%) adenocarcinoma, but its expression was not related to the histological type (P= 0.247 ). Expression of ILK was related to differentiation (rs=-0.296, P=0.009), lymph node metastasis (rs=0.311, P=0.006) and clinical stage (rs=0.350, P=0.002). Moreover, Kaplan-Meier survival estimates showed a significant correlation between ILK expression and patient survival in Log-rank test (P=0.006). Overexpression of ILK in NSCLC was associated with unfavorable prognosis. An inverse correlation between the levels of ILK and E-cadherin was found (rs=-0.514, P < 0.001). Western Blot result showed that the level of ILK in the tumor tissues was noticeably higher than that in the normal tissues (t=-6.811, P=0.0002), and an inverse correlation between the levels of ILK and E-cadherin was proved (P=0.001).

CONCLUSIONSIn NSCLC, ILK can interact with some tumor-associated factors, through which it appears to be involved in several oncogenesis-related events ,including promotion of cell survival ,as well as cell migration and invasion.ILK keeps significant inverse correlation to E-cadherin,andit would be one of the pathways for ILK to affect differentia-tion,clinical stage ,lymph node metastasis and prognosis of patients .ILK expression can be a useful predictorof poor prognosis in NSCLC,and the detections of ILK and E-cadherin will help us better to predict prognosisof patients .