Abstract

Platinum agents have shown to be effective in the treatment of colorectal cancer. We conducted a prospective study to investigate the effect of excision repair cross-complementation group 1 (ERCC1 rs11615C>T) and Excision repair cross-complementation group 2 (ERCC2 rs13181T>G) on the efficacy of oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy in colorectal cancer patients. A total of 335 cases newly diagnosed by histologically procedure as primary advanced colorectal cancer were collected. The genotypes of ERCC1 rs11615C>T and ERCC2 rs13181T>G genotyping was conducted with TaqMan Gene Expression assays using the ABI PRISM®7900HT Sequence Detection System. All the patients were followed up until death or the end of November, 2011. The median follow-up period was34.6 months, and 195 patients died during the follow-up. Compared with carrying ERCC1 T/Tgenotype, patients with a homozygous ERCC1 C/C genotype had a longer survival time. Similarly, the ERCC2 G/G genotype carriers had a lower risk of death from colorectal cancer compared with T/T genotype carriers. Our study suggested that the ERCC1 rs11615C>T andERCC2 rs13181T>G single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) could be a predictive marker for the prognosis of colorectal cancer. Further studies are needed to validate the results of our study in Chinese population.

Key words: Excision repair cross-complementation group 1 (ERCC1 rs11615C>T), excision repair cross-complementation group 2 (ERCC2 rs13181T>G), colorectal cancer, chemotherapy.