Oncogenic role and drug sensitivity of ETV4 in human tumors: a pan-cancer analysis

Rui Zhang; Yanfang Peng; Zhe Gao; Jing Qian; Kang Yang; Xinfa Wang; Wenjing Lu; Yongjie Zhu; Dezhi Qiu; Tong Jin; Gang Wang; Junping He; Ning Liu

doi:10.3389/fonc.2023.1121258

Oncogenic role and drug sensitivity of ETV4 in human tumors: a pan-cancer analysis

Front Oncol. 2023 May 2:13:1121258. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2023.1121258. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Rui Zhang^{1

2}, Yanfang Peng³, Zhe Gao¹, Jing Qian¹, Kang Yang¹, Xinfa Wang¹, Wenjing Lu¹, Yongjie Zhu¹, Dezhi Qiu¹, Tong Jin¹, Gang Wang¹, Junping He¹, Ning Liu²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neurosurgery, Children's Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.
² Department of Neurosurgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.
³ Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, The Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.

Abstract

Background: Increasing evidence supports a relationship between E twenty-six variant transcription factor 4 (ETV4) and several cancers, but no pan-cancer analysis has been reported.

Methods: The present study surveyed the effects of ETV4 on cancer using RNA sequencing data obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas and GTEx, and further explored its role in drug sensitivity using data from Cellminer. Differential expression analyses were conducted for multiple cancers using R software. Cox regression and survival analysis were employed to calculate correlations between ETV4 levels and survival outcomes in multiple cancers using the online tool Sangerbox. ETV4 expression was also compared with immunity, heterogeneity, stemness, mismatch repair genes, and DNA methylation among different cancers.

Results: ETV4 was found to be significantly upregulated in 28 tumors. Upregulation of ETV4 was associated with poor overall survival, progression free interval, disease-free-interval, and disease specific survival in several cancer types. Expression of ETV4 was also remarkably correlated with immune cell infiltration, tumor heterogeneity, mismatch repair gene expression, DNA methylation, and tumor stemness. Furthermore, ETV4 expression seemed to affect sensitivity to a number of anticancer drugs.

Conclusions: These results suggest that ETV4 may be useful as a prognostic factor and therapeutic target.

Keywords: ETV4; drug sensitivity; immunity; microenvironment; pancancer; prognostic.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 81602212), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20161119), Key Project supported by Medical Science and Technique Development Foundation (YKK15139), and Nanjing Medical Science and Technique Development Foundation (QRX17167).