CREM Is Correlated With Immune-Suppressive Microenvironment and Predicts Poor Prognosis in Gastric Adenocarcinoma

Kuai Yu; Linju Kuang; Tianmei Fu; Congkai Zhang; Yuru Zhou; Chao Zhu; Qian Zhang; Zhanglin Zhang; Aiping Le

doi:10.3389/fcell.2021.697748

CREM Is Correlated With Immune-Suppressive Microenvironment and Predicts Poor Prognosis in Gastric Adenocarcinoma

Front Cell Dev Biol. 2021 Dec 6:9:697748. doi: 10.3389/fcell.2021.697748. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Kuai Yu^{1

2}, Linju Kuang^{1

2}, Tianmei Fu^{1

2}, Congkai Zhang^{1

2}, Yuru Zhou^{1

2}, Chao Zhu^{1

2}, Qian Zhang^{1

2}, Zhanglin Zhang^{1

2}, Aiping Le^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Blood Transfusion, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, China.
² Key Laboratory of Jiangxi Province for Transfusion Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, China.

Abstract

The transcriptional repressor cAMP response element modulator (CREM) has an important role in T-cell development. In this study, we used the integrated Bioinformatics Methods to explore the role of CREM in gastric adenocarcinoma (GAC). Our results showed that high CREM expression was closely related with poorer overall survival in GAC. By GSEA cluster analysis, we found that the high expression of CREM was associated with the cancer-associated pathway in GAC. Moreover, single-cell sequencing data showed that CREM is mainly localized in exhausted CD8⁺ T cells. Its prognostic value and the potential function lead to T-cell exhaustion in the tumor microenvironment (TME). Similar results were also obtained in glioma and lung cancer. High expression of CREM, correlated with clinical relevance of GAC, was associated with T-cell exhaustion and M2 polarization in GAC. These findings suggest that CREM can be used as a prognostic biomarker in GAC, which might provide a novel direction to explore the pathogenesis of GAC.

Keywords: CREM; exhausted T cell; gastric cancer tumor microenvironment; immunosuppression; prognosis; tumor-associated macrophages; tumor-infiltrating.