Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 6 pp 8737—8761
Downregulation of FPN1 acts as a prognostic biomarker associated with immune infiltration in lung cancer
- 1 Key Laboratory of Animal Physiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Hebei Province, College of Life Sciences, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang 050024, Hebei, China
- 2 Department of Neurosurgery, HanDan Central Hospital, Handan 056001, Hebei, China
- 3 Department of Neurosurgery, The Second Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang 050000, Hebei, China
Received: July 21, 2020 Accepted: February 1, 2021 Published: March 10, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202685How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Liu 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
Lung cancer morbidity and mortality remain the leading causes of tumor-associated death worldwide. The discovery of early diagnostic and prognostic markers of lung cancer could significantly improve the survival rate and decrease the mortality rate. FPN1 is the only known mammalian iron exporter. However, the molecular and biological functions of FPN1 in lung cancer remain unclear. Here, FPN1 mRNA expression in lung cancer was estimated using the TCGA, Oncomine, TIMER, and UALCAN databases. The prognostic role of FPN1 was evaluated using Kaplan-Meier plotter and PrognoScan. Associations between FPN1 and immune infiltration in lung cancer were evaluated by the TIMER and CIBERSORT algorithms. FPN1 mRNA and protein expressions were significantly downregulated in lung cancer. Low FPN1 expression was strongly related to worse prognosis in patients with lung cancer. GO and KEGG analyses and GSEA suggested that FPN1 was remarkably related to iron homeostasis and immunity. Importantly, FPN1 was remarkably associated with the infiltrating abundance of multiple immune cells. Moreover, FPN1 displayed a strong correlation with various immune marker sets. We investigated the clinical application value of FPN1 and provided a basis for the sensitive diagnosis, prognostication and targeted therapy of lung cancer.