Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is characterized by difficult early detection, rapid tumor progression and low surgical resection rate in the late stage. The common complication of patients with lung adenocarcinoma is malignant pleural effusion (MPE). Compared with lung biopsy, cytological examination of exfoliated pleural effusion is a less invasive operation. Therefore, there is an urgent need to discover new and effective cytological biomarkers for the exfoliation of LUAD pleural effusion. This work took the differentially expressed genes of LUAD tumors and adjacent tissues in the Gepia database as the entry point and screened out Cell division cycle protein 20 (CDC20) as a new biomarker for lung adenocarcinoma. The expression levels of CDC20, TTF-1 and NapsinA in 92 cases of lung adenocarcinoma and adjacent normal tissues were analyzed, and immunohistochemical detection was performed on paraffin specimens of pleural effusion from 30 cases of lung adenocarcinoma and 30 cases of non-neoplastic patients. Immunohistochemistry indicated that CDC20 was more expressed in LUAD tissues in the 92 observation groups and was related to tumor size, T classification, and pleural invasion. In this study, the results showed the expression of CDC20 was relatively consistent with that of TTF-1 and NapsinA in LUAD and malignant pleural effusion. This study reveals the potential diagnostic value of CDC20 in biopsy specimens of LUAD and pleural effusion. Our discovery is of great significance for the pathological diagnosis of pleural effusion cytology.
Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.