Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 18 pp 18163—18180
Bioinformatics analysis of the clinical value and potential mechanisms of AHNAK2 in papillary thyroid carcinoma
- 1 Department of Vascular and Thyroid Surgery, The First Hospital, China Medical University, Shenyang, China
Received: February 25, 2020 Accepted: June 22, 2020 Published: September 23, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103645How to Cite
Copyright: © 2020 Xie 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
Background: AHNAK2 has been recently reported as a biomarker in many cancers. However, a systematic investigation of AHNAK2 in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) has not been conducted.
Results: AHNAK2 is overexpressed in PTC tissues and could be an independent prognostic factor. AHNAK2 expression was significantly high in patients with advanced stage, advanced T classification, lymph node metastasis, increased BRAF mutations and decreased RAS mutations. Cell adhesion-, cell junction-, and immune-related pathways were the most frequently noted in gene set enrichment analysis. AHNAK2 expression in PTC was positively correlated with immune infiltration and negatively correlated with AHNAK2 methylation. AHNAK2 expression was significantly positively correlated with tumor progression and poor overall survival (OS) in pan-cancer patients.
Conclusions: AHNAK2 is a good biomarker for the diagnosis and prognosis of PTC. AHNAK2 may promote thyroid cancer progression through cell adhesion-, cell junction-, and immune-related pathways. Methylation may act as an upstream regulator to inhibit the expression and biological function of AHNAK2. Additionally, AHNAK2 has broad prognostic value in pan-cancer.
Methods: Based on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data, we screened AHNAK2-related genes through weighted gene coexpression network analysis and explored the clinical value and the potential mechanism of AHNAK2 in PTC by multiomics analysis.