Research Paper|Volume 16, Issue 14|pp 11289—11317

Pro-apoptotic gene BAX is a pan-cancer predictive biomarker for prognosis and immunotherapy efficacy

Siying Wang¹, Xuyu Chen^1,², Xiaofei Zhang¹, Kang Wen¹, Xin Chen¹, Jingyao Gu¹, Juan Li¹, Zhaoxia Wang¹

¹Department of Oncology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210011, Jiangsu, P.R. China
²Department of Gastroenterology, The Affiliated Hospital of Yangzhou University, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225012, Jiangsu, P.R. China

* Equal contribution

Received: August 30, 2023Accepted: June 10, 2024Published: July 5, 2024

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206003

Copyright: © 2024 Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Background: Apoptosis Regulator BCL2 Associated X (BAX) is a pro-apoptotic gene. Apoptosis is one of the important components of immune response and immune regulation. However, there is no systematic pan-cancer analysis of BAX.

Methods: Original data of this study were downloaded from TCGA databases and GTEX databases. We conducted the gene expression analysis and survival analysis of BAX in 33 types of cancer via Gene Expression Profiling Interactive Analysis (GEPIA) database. Real-time PCR and immunohistochemistry (IHC) were further performed to examine the BAX expression in cancer cells and tissues. Moreover, the relationship between BAX and immune infiltration and gene alteration was studied by the Tumor Immune Estimation Resource (TIMER) and cBioPortal tools. Protein–protein interaction analysis was performed in the STRING database. Finally, Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) were utilized to evaluate the enrichment analysis.

Results: BAX was highly expressed in most cancers and was associated with poor prognosis in nine cancer types. In addition, BAX showed significant clinical relevance, and the mRNA expression of BAX was also strongly associated with drug sensitivity of many drugs. Furthermore, BAX may participate in proliferation and metastasis of many cancers and was associated with methylation. Importantly, BAX expression was positively correlated with most immune infiltrating cells.

Conclusion: Our findings suggested that BAX can function as an oncogene and may be used as a potential predictive biomarker for prognosis and immunotherapy efficacy of human cancer, which could provide a new approach for cancer therapy.