Down-regulation of ERAP1 mRNA expression in non-small cell lung cancer

Background ERAP1 is a major aminopeptidase that serves as an editor of the peptide repertoire by trimming N-terminal residues of antigenic peptides, creating a pool of peptides with the optimal length for MHC-I binding. As an important component of the antigen processing and presenting machinery – APM, ERAP1 is frequently down-regulated in many cancers. Since ERAP1 expression has not yet been thoroughly investigated in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), we decided to analyze ERAP1 mRNA levels in tissues collected from NSCLC patients. Methods Using real-time qPCR, we evaluated ERAP1 mRNA expression in samples of tumor and adjacent non-tumor tissue (serving as control tissue) from 61 NSCLC patients. Results We observed a significantly lower level of ERAP1 mRNA expression in tumor tissue (Med Tumor = 0.75) in comparison to non-tumor tissue (Med Non-tumor = 1.1), p = 0.008. One of the five tested polymorphisms, namely rs26653, turned out to be significantly associated with ERAP1 expression in non-tumor tissue (difference [d] = 0.59 CI95% (0.14;1.05), p = 0.0086), but not in tumor tissue. The levels of ERAP1 mRNA expression did not affect the overall survival of NSCLC patients, either in the case of the tumor ( p = 0.788) or in non-tumor ( p = 0.298) tissue. We did not detect any association between mRNA ERAP1 expression level in normal tissue and: (i) age at diagnosis ( p = 0.8386), (ii) patient’s sex ( p = 0.3616), (iii) histological type of cancer ( p = 0.7580) and (iv) clinical stage of NSCLC ( p = 0.7549). Furthermore, in the case of tumor tissue none of the abovementioned clinical parameters were associated with ERAP1 expression ( p = 0.76). Conclusion Down-regulation of ERAP1 mRNA observed in NSCLC tissue may be related to tumor immune evasion strategy. The rs26653 polymorphism can be considered an expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) associated with ERAP1 expression in normal lung tissue.