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Recent studies have suggested that dysregulation of autophagy plays a pivotal role in tumorigenesis. Here, we determined the prognostic value of autophagy-related protein Beclin 1 in gastric cancer. A total of 153 primary gastric cancer patients were subjected to analysis of Beclin 1 expression and survival prognosis. Among them, 68 patients were assigned randomly and used as a training set to generate a cutoff score for Beclin 1 expression by receive operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. The ROC-generated cutoff score was subjected to analyze the association of Beclin 1 with clinical characteristics and patient outcome. In a testing set (n = 85) and overall patients (n = 153), both univariate and multivariate analysis found that low expression of Beclin 1 predicted adverse overall survival and progression-free survival for gastric cancer patients. Furthermore, in each stage of gastric cancer patients, Beclin 1 expression was a prognostic indicator in patients with stage II, III and IV. Importantly, a reverse relationship between Beclin 1 and Bcl-xL expression was demonstrated. In patients of elevated Bcl-xL expression, a subset with lower Beclin 1 expression displayed an inferior overall survival and progression-free survival than those with higher Beclin 1 expression. Thus, our data demonstrated that low expression of Beclin 1, associated with high Bcl-xL, played as an independent biomarker, contributing to a more aggressive cancer cell phenotype and poor prognosis for gastric tumor.

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) acquires an unfavorable prognosis, emerging as a major challenge for the treatment of breast cancer. In the present study, 122 TNBC patients were subjected to analysis of Aurora-A (Aur-A) expression and survival prognosis. We found that Aur-A high expression was positively associated with initial clinical stage (P = 0.025), the proliferation marker Ki-67 (P = 0.001), and the recurrence rate of TNBC patients (P