Aim: To set up a real-time fluorescent quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay, to detect human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) messenger RNA in gastric carcinomas, and to evaluate quantitative determination of hTERT mRNA in the diagnostic value of gastric carcinomas, and to analyze the correlation between the expression level of hTERT mRNA and clinicopathological parameters in patients with gastric cancer.
Methods: A real-time quantitative RT-PCR (RQ-PCR) based on TaqMan fluorescence methodology and the LightCycler system was used to quantify the full range of hTERT mRNA copy numbers in 35 samples of gastric carcinomas and corresponding adjacent non-cancerous tissues. The normalized hTERT (NhTERT) was standardized by quantifying the number of GAPDH transcripts as internal control and expressed as 100X (hTERT/GAPDH) ratio. Variables were analyzed by the Student's t-test, chi2 test and Fisher's exact test.
Results: NhTERT from gastric carcinomas and corresponding adjacent non-cancerous tissues was 6.27+/-0.89 and 0.93+/-0.18, respectively (t = 12.76, P<0.001). There was no significant association between gastric cancer hTERT mRNA expression level and patient's age, gender, tumor size, location and stage (pTNM), but a significant correlation was found between hTERT mRNA expression level in gastric carcinomas and the degree of differentiation.
Conclusion: Quantitative determination of hTERT mRNA by RQ-PCR is a rapid and sensitive method. hTERT might be a potential biomarker for the early detection of gastric cancer.