High Trophinin‑Associated Protein Expression and Its Role in Prognosis of Pancreatic Cancer

Background: Trophinin‑associated protein (TROAP) was known as the tastin, which originally recognized as a cytosolic protein involved in embryo implantation. Increasing studies have revealed that high expression of TROAP is related with poor outcomes in cancers. However, there have been few studies on the correlation of TROAP and pancreatic cancer. This study aimed to explore the prognostic significance of TROAP in pancreatic cancer by mining the data collected from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset. Methods: Clinical information and the RNA expression data were obtained from the TCGA dataset. The correlations between clinical information and TROAP mRNA expression were performed by chi-square and Fisher exact tests. Univariate Cox analyses were used to filter the potential prognostic factors. The correlations between TROAP expression and clinical characteristics of patients with pancreatic cancer were confirmed by multivariate Cox analyses.Results: Analysis of tumor data showed that high expression of TROAP was correlated with poor outcomes in pancreatic cancer patients. Univariate and multivariate Cox analyses demonstrated that TROAP mRNA expression played an important role in shorting overall survival (OS) and relapse-free survival (RFS), which might serve as the useful biomarker and prognostic factor for pancreatic cancer. Conclusions: TROAP was an independent risk factor for pancreatic cancer. TROAP has the potential to be a biomarker, especially in predicting prognosis.