Research Paper Volume 11, Issue 24 pp 11814—11828
Circadian clock associates with tumor microenvironment in thoracic cancers
- 1 Department of Thoracic Surgery, The Affiliated Suzhou Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing Medical University, Jiangsu 215001, China
- 2 The Affiliated Suzhou Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing Medical University, Jiangsu 215001, China
Received: November 7, 2018 Accepted: November 7, 2019 Published: December 23, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102450How to Cite
Copyright © 2019 Yang et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The application of cancer chronotherapy is to treat cancers based on at specific times during circadian rhythms. Previous studies have characterized the impact of circadian clock on tumorigenesis and specific immune cells. Here, by using multi-omics computation techniques, we systematically characterized the distinct roles of core circadian clock genes in thoracic cancers including lung adenocarcinoma, lung squamous cell carcinoma, and esophageal carcinoma. Strikingly, a wide range of core clock genes are epigenetically altered in lung adenocarcinomas and lung squamous cell carcinomas but not esophageal carcinomas. Further cancer hallmark analysis reveals that several core clock genes highly correlate with apoptosis and cell cycle such as RORA and PER2. Interestingly, our results reveal that CD4 and CD8 T cells are correlated with core clock molecules especially in lung adenocarcinomas and lung squamous cell carcinomas, indicating that chrono-immunotherapy may serve as a candidate option for future cancer management.