Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 17|pp 17167—17208

SNAI1 is a prognostic biomarker and correlated with immune infiltrates in gastrointestinal cancers

Jiaying Fang², Zan Ding¹

¹The Institute of Metabolic Diseases, Baoan Central Hospital of Shenzhen, The Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518102, Guangdong, China
²Medical Department, Affiliated Huadu Hospital, Southern Medical University (People’s Hospital of Huadu), Shenzhen 518102, Guangdong, China

Received: February 17, 2020Accepted: June 4, 2020Published: August 21, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Fang 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

Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT)-related genes play an important role in immunosuppression. However, the correlations of EMT-related genes to prognosis and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in different cancers remain unclear. TCGA, GEO databases were used to analyze the expression, prognosis, and immune infiltration of EMT markers in cancer. RT-qPCR, immunohistochemistry, and western blot were used to analysis the expression and prognosis of SNAI1 in gastrointestinal cancers. High SNAI1 expression was closely related with poorer overall survival in gastrointestinal cancers in TCGA cohort. High SNAI1 expression was closely related with poorer overall survival in gastrointestinal cancers, and was validated in GEO database. Simultaneously, high expression of SNAI1 correlates with clinical relevance of gastric cancer. Moreover, SNAI1 expression was associated with tumor-infiltrating immune cells in gastrointestinal cancers. In addition, RT-qPCR, immunohistochemistry, and western blot showed SNAI1 expression was higher in gastrointestinal cancers compared to the normal tissues. Finally, high SNAI1 expression was closely related with poorer overall survival and correlates with clinical relevance of gastrointestinal cancers in an independent validation cohort. In summary, the results approaches to suggest that SNAI1 can be used as a prognostic biomarker for determining prognosis and immune infiltration in gastrointestinal cancers.