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Research Paper|Volume 14, Issue 22|pp 9128—9148

Prognostic value and immunological role of FOXM1 in human solid tumors

Guohua Wei1, Xin Yang2, Huangzhou Lu3, Lan Zhang4, Yong Wei2, Hai Li5, Mingxia Zhu6, Xin Zhou7
  • 1Department of Anesthesiology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, China
  • 2Department of Urology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210000, China
  • 3Department of Emergency, Changshu No.2 People's Hospital, The Fifth Affiliated Clinical Medical College of Yangzhou University, Changshu 215500, Jiangsu, China
  • 4Department of Radiation Oncology, Shanghai Tenth People’s Hospital of Tongji University, Shanghai 200072, China
  • 5Department of Pathology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, China
  • 6Department of Radiation Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China
  • 7Department of Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, China
* Equal contribution
Received: March 11, 2022Accepted: November 14, 2022Published: November 21, 2022
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204394

Copyright: © 2022 Wei 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

FOXM1 acts as an oncogenic transcription factor and is involved in multiple hallmarks of human malignancies. Recent studies have demonstrated that FOXM1 is upregulated and correlated with poor prognosis in a majority of cancers. However, there are few pan-cancer analyses of FOXM1. This study aimed to investigate the expression profiles and clinical significance of FOXM1 in 31 types of solid tumors. We explored the expression profiles and the prognostic value of FOXM1 in pan-cancer across The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We further used lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) tissues combined with quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) for experimental validation of FOXM1 expression. Besides, we verified the function of FOXM1 in a lung cancer cell line. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was conducted to explore signaling pathways related to FOXM1 expression. We observed that up-regulated FOXM1 was significantly related to poor survival in most tumors. Furthermore, there are significant correlations between FOXM1 expression and the infiltrating levels of different types of immune cells, TMB, MSI and immune checkpoint genes in a variety of cancers. Additional analysis based on IMvigor 210 cohort confirmed that patients with high level of FOXM1 exhibited a superior response to anti-PD-L1 therapy, and had a prolonged OS. In conclusion, this study indicated that FOXM1 could serve as a prognostic biomarker for most types of cancers and played a crucial role in the tumor immune microenvironment.