To investigate the expression and significance of CD133 and CXCR4 in pancreatic cancer and their clinical relevance.

Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the expression of CD133 and CXCR4 in fifty-three resected pancreatic cancer tissues, pericarcinomatous normal tissues, peripancreatic lymph node tissues and the normal pancreas tissues. The correlations among the variety of expressions of CD133 and CXCR4 and pancreatic clinical pathologic characters were statistically analysed, respectively to investigate whether there was clinical relevance between the expression of CD133 and CXCR4.

The positive expression rates of CD133 and CXCR4 in pancreatic cancer tissues were 75.5% (40/53) and 83.0% (44/53) respectively. Co-expression rate of CD133 and CXCR4 was 69.8% (37/53). The positive expression rates of CD133 and CXCR4 were associated with lymph node metastases, TNM pathologic stage, tumor differentiation degree, respectively (P<0.05). And the positive expression of CD133 and CXCR4 in protein expression level had obviously clinical relevance (P<0.05). Consequently, the postoperation survival rates of CD133-positive and CXCR4-positive groups were significantly shorter than those of negative groups, respectively (P<0.05).

As two important moleculars in prancreatic cancer stem cells, both CD133 and CXCR4 play important roles in the tumorigenesis, development and late lymph node metastasis of pancreatic carcinoma, and also can be used as the effective biomarkers to judge the clinical prognosis.