Post-Surgery Circulating Tumor Cells and AXL Overexpression as New Poor Prognostic Biomarkers in Resected Lung Adenocarcinoma Miguel-Pérez, Diego de Bayarri Lara, Clara Isabel Ortega, Francisco G. Russo, Alessandro Moyano Rodríguez, María José Álvarez Cubero, María Jesús Maza Serrano, Elizabeth Lorente Acosta, José Antonio Rolfo, Christian Serrano, María José Circulating tumor cells Adenocarcinoma Liquid biopsy NSCLC AXL Prognosis Background: The prognosis of early stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is quite disappointing and the benefits of adjuvant therapy are relatively small. Thus, there is an urgent need to identify novel prognostic and predictive biomarkers. Lung adenocarcinoma has distinct clinical–pathological characteristics and novel therapeutic strategies are under active evaluation in the adjuvant setting. Here, we investigated the prognostic impact of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and gene and miRNA tissue expression in resectable NSCLC. Results: ADC (n = 47) and SCC (n = 50) revealed different tissue expression profiles, resulting in the presence of different CTC subpopulations. In ADC, miR-155 correlated with AXL and IL6R expression, which were related to the presence of EMT CTC1 (p = 0.014 and p = 0.004). In the multivariate analysis, CTC2 was an independent prognostic factor for relapse-free survival, and CTC3 and AXL were independent prognostic for overall survival only in ADC. Neither the surgery nor the adjuvant treatment influenced the prognosis of these patients. Conclusions: Our study elucidate the prognostic impact of tissue AXL expression and the presence of CTCs after surgery in adenocarcinoma patients. Tissue AXL expression and CTC EMT activation could potentially represent biomarkers for the stratification of ADC patients that might benefit from new adjuvant therapies. 2020-01-14T11:21:26Z 2020-01-14T11:21:26Z 2019-11-07 journal article de Miguel-Pérez, D., Bayarri-Lara, C. I., Ortega, F. G., Russo, A., Moyano Rodriguez, M. J., Alvarez-Cubero, M. J., ... & Serrano, M. J. (2019). Post-Surgery Circulating Tumor Cells and AXL Overexpression as New Poor Prognostic Biomarkers in Resected Lung Adenocarcinoma. Cancers, 11(11), 1750. http://hdl.handle.net/10481/58724 10.3390/cancers11111750 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ open access Atribución 3.0 España MDPI