Do pentraxin 3 and neural pentraxin 2 have different facet function in hepatocellular carcinoma?

The long pentraxin (PTX) 3 and the neuronal pentraxin (NPTX) 2 has been found to exert pleiotropic roles in cancers due to their action in inflammation. However, the accurate clinical significance of PTX3 and NPTX2 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), one of the commonest cancers in the world has not been well-defined. The aim of the study was to analyze the expression profile of PTX3 and NPTX2 in liver biopsies of HCV-positive HCC patients (liver recipients, LR, n = 14, age 59.4 ± 1.8 years) undergoing liver transplantation and in donors (LD, n = 14, age 62.1 ± 17.3 years), trying both to identify them as predictive biomarkers of clinical liver severity in HCC patients and to understand if they were mutually substitutable. The PTX3 and NPTX2 transcripts were significantly up regulated in HCC tissues (p = 0.004 and p = 0.02 LD vs. LR, respectively). Dividing patients following MELD score, PTX3 expression increased as a function of liver disease severity, while this trend was not observed for NPTX2, which mRNA level increased similarly in both MELD group, reaching the significance only in patients with MELD score < 9 (p = 0.01). A positive correlation was found between PTX3 and NPTX2 expression (p = 0.001; r = 0.69). This is the first study that concerns PTX3 and NPTX2 as a function of clinical severity from which emerged that both of them are unequivocally involved in HCC, but only PTX3 could be considered a staging marker in these HCV-related HCC patients, unlike NPTX2, which could only play a role as an inflammatory marker.