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Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 24|pp 12165—12176

GPX1, a biomarker for the diagnosis and prognosis of kidney cancer, promotes the progression of kidney cancer

Yongbiao Cheng1,2, Tianbo Xu1,2, Sen Li1,2, Hailong Ruan1,2
  • 1Department of Urology, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430022, China
  • 2Institute of Urology, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430022, China
* Equal contribution
Received: September 24, 2019Accepted: November 20, 2019Published: December 16, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102555

Copyright © 2019 Cheng 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

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is the most common malignant tumor of the kidney, and its diagnosis and prognosis still lack reliable biomarkers. Glutathione peroxidase 1 (GPX1) has been identified to be highly expressed in a variety of human malignancies. However, few studies have studied the expression of GPX1 and its biological functions in RCC. We attempted to assess the potential of GPX1 as a promising biomarker for RCC diagnosis and prognosis. In this study, we analyzed and explored the public cancer databases (TCGA and ONCOMINE) to conclude that GPX1 is highly expressed in RCC. Meanwhile, we evaluated the expression of GPX1 at the levels of RCC cells and tissues to verify the results of the database. Moreover, high GPX1 levels were positively correlated with short overall survival time, distant metastasis, lymphatic metastasis, and tumor stage. Receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis showed that high GPX1 levels could distinguish RCC patients from normal subjects (p < 0.0001). Kaplan-Meier curve analysis revealed that high GPX1 levels predicted shorter overall survival time (p = 0.0009). Finally, the functional roles of GPX1 were examined using a GPX1 sh-RNA knockdown method in RCC cell lines. In summary, our results suggest that GPX1 may have the potential to serve as a diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for RCC patients. Moreover, targeting GPX1 may represent as a new therapeutic strategy and direction for RCC patients.