Immune-related gene ANGPT1 is an adverse biomarker for endometrial carcinoma

Binbin Nong; Tongye Su; Mingyang Jin; Jintai Huang; Aimin Huang; Dalang Fang; Jie Wei

doi:10.21037/tcr-21-671

Immune-related gene ANGPT1 is an adverse biomarker for endometrial carcinoma

Transl Cancer Res. 2021 Jun;10(6):2962-2976. doi: 10.21037/tcr-21-671.

Authors

Binbin Nong^#^{1

2}, Tongye Su^#^{1

3}, Mingyang Jin², Jintai Huang², Aimin Huang², Dalang Fang⁴, Jie Wei¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Hematology, People's Hospital of Baise, Baise, China.
² Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, The Affiliated Hospital of Youjiang Medical University for Nationalities, Baise, China.
³ Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, People's Hospital of Baise, Baise, China.
⁴ Department of Breast and Thyroid Surgery, The Affiliated Hospital of Youjiang Medical University for Nationalities, Baise, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Background: Immunotherapy has made great strides in cancer treatment. Endometrial carcinoma (EC) has been 1 of the most common tumors among women. This study aimed to screen immune-related prognosis biomarkers for EC.

Methods: The transcriptome profiling and clinical data of EC were downloaded from The Carcinoma Genome Atlas (TCGA) public database, and differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were obtained through the limma package in R software. An immune-related genes (IRGs) list was collected from the ImmPort database. We constructed a free-scale gene co-expression network via weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA). Then, the intersection genes of the module genes which significantly related to EC, along with IRGs and DEGs were screened as the candidate genes for further analysis. We identified the hub gene via Venn analysis of the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network genes and the prognostic genes, and verified expression of the hub gene through Human Protein Atlas (HPA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases which provided the GSE17025 dataset. Furthermore, we used the CIBERSORT deconvolution algorithm to explore tumor immune cells infiltration in EC, and investigated correlations between the hub gene and immune cells.

Results: The differential expression analysis demonstrated that there were 900 up-regulated genes and 1,008 down-regulated genes in TCGA-UCEC (Uterine Corpus Endometrial Carcinoma) cohort. There were 74 candidate intersection genes in blue module genes, IRGs, and DEGs. Finally, angiopoietin 1 (ANGPT1) was identified as the hub gene in EC. Low expression of ANGPT1 was associated with better overall survival (OS) in EC patients. The expression of ANGPT1 was negatively correlated with regulatory T cells (Tregs), but positively correlated with resting memory cluster of differentiation 4 (CD4) T cells, activated dendritic cells (DCs), activated natural killer (NK) cells, and activated memory CD4 T cells (P<0.05, Spearman). A high-infiltrating regulatory T cell would improve the prognosis for EC patients.

Conclusions: The gene ANGPT1 can increase the infiltration of T cells and improve the prognosis of EC patients.

Keywords: Endometrial carcinoma (EC); angiopoietin 1; bioinformatics analysis; immune infiltrates.