High expression of TAZ serves as a novel prognostic biomarker and drives cancer progression in renal cancer

Renal cell carcinomas are a group of most common renal malignancies whose clinical intervention is complicated by the lack of early diagnosis and reliable prognosis biomarkers, insensitive radiotherapy and chemotherapy and expensive molecular-targeted drugs. Transcriptional coactivator TAZ has been implicated in the formation and development of various malignancies. However, the biological characteristics and function of TAZ in renal cell carcinoma are still unclear. We attempted to evaluate the potential of TAZ as a promising diagnostic and prognostic molecular marker for renal cell carcinoma. In our study, we confirmed that TAZ was frequently elevated in renal cancer tissues and cells, consistent with the results of the publicly available cancer database. Moreover, elevated TAZ expression was positively correlated with poor overall survival time, high Fuhrman grade and distant metastasis. Our receiver operating characteristic curves analysis showed that high TAZ expression could distinguish renal cancer patients from normal persons (p < 0.0001). Kaplan-Meier curves demonstrated that high TAZ expression predicted poor overall survival (p < 0.0001). Multivariate regression analysis indicated that TAZ expression could be an independent prognostic factor (p = 0.002) in patients with renal cancer. Finally, the functional roles of TAZ knockdown were examined in renal cancer cell lines and nude mice subcutaneous tumor models. In conclusion, our results suggest that TAZ may serve as a promising diagnostic and prognostic molecular marker for patients with renal cancer. Moreover, TAZ may represent a novel clinical therapeutic target.