Evaluation of Minichromosome Maintenance-3 (Mcm3) in Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Statement of the problem: the expression of minichromosome maintenance-3 (mcm3) proteins and their diagnostic value in oral mucosal dysplasia and squa-mous cell carcinoma (scc) is not well known.purpose: this study was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of minichromosome maintenance 3 (mcm3) as a biomarker for diagnosis of oral premalignant lesions and scc.materials and method: in this study, 31 oral scc, 20 dysplastic epithelium and 20 controls were selected and immunohistochemical staining was done for mcm3. anova, tukey hsd, mann-whitney and kruskal-wallis tests were used to com-pare the groups and the correlation between different grades.results: there was increasing trend of mcm3 from control to dysplastic epithelium and from dysplastic epithelium to scc both in suprabasal layers and in total epithelial layers. mcm3 expression was elevated with increasing the grade of dys-plasia, but there was no statistically significant difference (p= 0.93). the expression was also increased in high grades of scc compared to lower grades.conclusion: mcm3 can be used as a useful biomarker in the diagnosis of premalig-nant lesions and oral scc.