Cancers (Mar 2022)

Tumor-Tissue Expression of the Hyaluronic Acid Receptor RHAMM Predicts Histological Transformation in Follicular Lymphoma Patients

  • Marie Beck Enemark,
  • Trine Engelbrecht Hybel,
  • Charlotte Madsen,
  • Kristina Lystlund Lauridsen,
  • Bent Honoré,
  • Trine Lindhardt Plesner,
  • Stephen Hamilton-Dutoit,
  • Francesco d’Amore,
  • Maja Ludvigsen

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers14051316
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 5
p. 1316

Abstract

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Histological transformation (HT) remains the leading cause of mortality in follicular lymphoma (FL), underlining the need to identify reliable transformation predictors. The hyaluronic acid receptors CD44 and the receptor for hyaluronan mediated motility (RHAMM, also known as HMMR and CD168), have been shown to be involved in the pathogeneses of both solid tumors and hematological malignancies. In an attempt to improve risk stratification, expression of RHAMM and CD44 were evaluated by immunohistochemistry and digital image analysis in pre-therapeutic tumor-tissue biopsies from FL patients, either without (nt-FL, n = 34), or with (st-FL, n = 31) subsequent transformation, and in paired biopsies from the transformed lymphomas (tFL, n = 31). At the time of initial diagnosis, samples from st-FL patients had a higher expression of RHAMM compared with samples from nt-FL patients (p p p = 0.002, p p = 0.034, respectively). Our data suggest that high tumor-tissue RHAMM expression predicts the risk of shorter transformation-free survival in FL patients already at initial diagnosis.

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