Alnabulsi A, et al. - The possible prognostic significance of the expression of brown fat-associated proteins in colorectal cancer was investigated given that the aberrant expression of a brown fat-like phenotype in cancer cells has been previously implicated in tumour growth. Researchers developed monoclonal antibodies to brown fat-associated proteins CIDEA, ELOVL3, ELOVL5, and UCP1 and used them to profile the expression of protein targets by immunohistochemistry. For this, they used a discovery cohort including 50 normal colonic mucosa samples and 274 primary colorectal cancers and a validation cohort that included 549 colorectal cancers. In the majority of colorectal tumours, they detected immunostaining for UCP1. Normal colonic mucosa exhibited no immunostaining. In both the discovery cohort and the validation cohort, better overall survival was observed in significant relation to the expression of UCP1. Overall, the brown fat-like phenotype was identified as a novel pathway related to survival in colorectal cancer. A significant prognostic biomarker for colorectal cancer was the expression of UCP1.