Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 3|pp 2595—2609

Notch1/2/3/4 are prognostic biomarker and correlated with immune infiltrates in gastric cancer

Jian Hu¹, Jianghong Yu², Jun Gan¹, Ning Song³, Liubin Shi¹, Jie Liu², Ziqiang Zhang³, Jianjun Du¹

¹Department of General Surgery, Huashan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai 200040, China
²Department of Digestive Diseases of Huashan Hospital and Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai 200040, China
³Department of General Surgery, Huashan Hospital North, Fudan University, Shanghai 200040, China

* Equal contribution

Received: September 11, 2019Accepted: January 12, 2020Published: February 6, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Hu 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

Notch refers to a set of genes encoding a family of transmembrane receptors in mammalian cells. Previous evidence indicated that Notch receptors were implicated in the onset of gastric cancer. However, there is little evidence on the different genetic expression patterns of the four Notch receptors and their values for patient prognosis. Most recently, we investigated the transcriptional data of Notch receptors and related patient survival in patients with GC based on several databases, including ONCOMINE, GEPIA, Kaplan–Meier Plotter, cBioPortal and TIMER. According to our findings, gastric cancer tissues, compared with adjacent normal tissues presented a higher level of expression of Notch1/2/3. We also performed a survival analysis and noted that gastric cancer patients with high transcription levels of Notch1/2/3/4 had a low relapse-free survival. In gastric cancer patients, higher levels of infiltration in their CD4+ T cells, macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells were positive associated with the expression of Notch receptors. Notch expression had significant association with diverse immune marker sets in gastric cancer. Overall, this study provides evidence that Notch1/2/3/4 could become the potential targets for precision treatment and new biomarkers in the prognosis of gastric cancer.