Quantitative study of collagen in the extracellular matrix of non-small cell lung carcinoma specimens

Abstract

Lung cancer (LC) is a serious global health problem, as it remains the most common cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Most LC cases are diagnosed late, with a large portion of cases treated surgically progressing to an advanced stage. Therefore, there is great importance regarding systemic therapy in the clinical management of these patients, seeking a better clinical outcome. Systemic therapy is guided by a variety of clinicopathological factors that include: patient clinical conditions, pathological stage of disease, tumor type, and tumor biomarker status. However, a high rate of recurrence and/or metastases has been observed after curative surgery in patients with LC, suggesting that conventional histopathological evaluation cannot detect early microscopic dissemination. Thus, highlighting the need to establish new tools that can assist in this process. During the invasion process, both in local progression and in distant PC metastasis, tumor dissemination has been associated with several mechanisms, in particular, with the process called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). In this context, the extracellular matrix, particularly the collagens present there, influence the EMT process, since collagen deposition and cross-linking are necessary for tumor progression and to promote the invasion of cancer cells through their interactions between collagens and other molecules that promote this process. Thus, the present project aims to evaluate the expression of collagens I, III and V in specimens of non-small cell lung carcinoma in order to understand their expression behavior and their possible correlation with the clinical outcome of these patients, as well as associating them with previously quantified EMT factors.