Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest malignancies with few early detection tests or effective therapies. PI3K-AKT signaling is recognized to modulate cancer progression. We previously identified that a genetic variant in PKN1 increased pancreatic cancer risk through the PKN1/FAK/PI3K/AKT pathway. In order to investigate the associations between genetic variations in that pathway and pancreatic cancer prognosis, we conducted a two-stage survival analysis in a total of 547 Chinese pancreatic cancer patients. Consequently, a variant, rs13167294 A>C in PIK3R1, was significantly associated with poor survival in both stages and with hazard ratio being 1.32 (95% CI = 1.13-1.56, P = 0.0007) in the combined analysis. Function annotation and prediction suggested that genetic variants in this locus might affect overall survival of pancreatic cancer patients by regulating PIK3R1 expression.
Keywords: PI3K; genetic variant; genome-wide association study; pancreatic cancer survival.
© 2019 The Authors. Cancer Medicine published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.