Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 4|pp 5698—5717

Identification of novel candidate biomarkers for pancreatic adenocarcinoma based on TCGA cohort

Yang Jie¹, Wang Peng², Yuan-Yuan Li²

¹Department of Pharmacy, Shandong Provincial Hospital, Jinan 250022, Shandong, P.R. China
²Department of Pharmacy, The First Affiliated Hospital of Shandong First Medical University, Jinan 250014, Shandong, P.R. China

Received: July 2, 2020Accepted: December 18, 2020Published: February 11, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202494

Copyright: © 2021 Jie 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

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PAAD) is the most serious solid tumor type throughout the world. The present study aimed to identify novel biomarkers and potential efficacious small drugs in PAAD using integrated bioinformatics analyses. A total of 4777 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were filtered, 2536 upregulated DEGs and 2241 downregulated DEGs. Weighted gene co-expression network analysis was then used and identified 12 modules, of which, blue module with the most significant enrichment result was selected. KEGG and GO enrichment analyses showed that all DEGs of blue module were enriched in EMT and PI3K/Akt pathway. Three hub genes (ITGB1, ITGB5, and OSMR) were determined as key genes with higher expression levels, significant prognostic value and excellent diagnostic efficiency for PAAD. Additionally, some small molecule drugs that possess the potential to treat PAAD were screened out, including thapsigargin (TG). Functional in vitro experiments revealed that TG repressed cell viability via inactivating the PI3K/Akt pathway in PAAD cells. Totally, our findings identified three key genes implicated in PAAD and screened out several potential small drugs to treat PAAD.