The role of heat shock protein 70 expression in Oral potentially malignant disorders: A systematic review

Abstract

Introduction: Oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMD) are chronic conditions that can progress to malignancy. Heat shock proteins (HSP) are a group of proteins that act as molecular chaperones. HSPs can promote growth of tumor cells; on the other hand they stimulate immune response against tumor cells. In this review we aimed to identify the role of HSP70 expression in diagnosis and prognosis of OPMD. Methods: In this systematic review study, all English and Persian articles were searched with the keywords of "oral lichen planus" and " Leukoplakia " and " Oral Submucous Fibrosis " and "heat shock protein 70" and " oral premalignant disorders " and their Persian equivalents from Google scholar, PubMed, science direct, Cochrane, Scopus and Sid databases until March 2020. The quality of the selected studies was evaluated by the Newcastle-Ottawa scale method. Results: Totally 20 articles were selected and reviewed. The results of study showed that there was overexpression of HSP70 in OPMD. A significant correlation of HSP70 expression was observed with severity of epithelial dysplasia and the expression of HSP70 can be a marker for the presence of dysplasia in OPMD. Conclusions: Enhanced HSP70 levels in pre-malignant and malignant cells suggests that not only the oncogenes and tumorsuppressor genes are involved in the process of oral carcinogenesis, HSP70s may also be implicated in tumorigenesis. Taking all these into account, we can suppose that in the future, HSP70 can be a target for an anticancer immunotherapy.