Background. The association between human endogenous retroviruses-K (HERV-K) (HML-2) and human disease, including a variety of cancers, has been indicated. However, the function of HERV-K (HML-2) in the progression of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) still remains largely unclear. Methods. We detected the expression of HERV-K (HML-2) in 84 HCC tissues and adjacent nontumor tissues by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) and analyzed its correlation with the clinical parameters. Result. The HEVR-K level was significantly increased in HCC compared with adjacent normal tissues () which was proved to be significantly associated with cirrhosis (), tumor differentiation (), and TNM stage (). Moreover, the high expression of HERV-K (HML-2) had a poorer overall survival than patients with lower expression by a Kaplan-Meier survival analysis (). The multivariate Cox regression analysis indicated that the level of HERV-K (HML-2) was an independent prognostic factor for the overall survival rate of HCC patients. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves demonstrated the diagnostic accuracy of HERV-K (HML-2) expression in HCC (AUC = 0.729, 74.7% sensitivity, and 67.8% specificity). Conclusions. Our results suggested that upregulation of HERV-K (HML-2) in HCC patients was significantly related to cancer progression and poor outcome, indicating that HERV-K (HML-2) might be a novel candidate prognostic biomarker for HCC.
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