Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD), as the most frequent pathological subtype of non−small cell lung cancer, is often characterized by poor prognosis and low 5-year survival rate. Exploriton of new biomarkers and accurate molecular mechanisms for effectively predicting the prognosis of LUAD patients is still necessary. Presently, BTG2 and SerpinB5, which play important roles in tumors, are studied as a gene pair for the first time with the aim of exploring whether they can be used as potential prognostic markers.
Using the bioinformatics method to explore whether BTG2 and SerpinB5 can become independent prognostic factors, and explore their clinical application value and whether they can be used as immunotherapeutic markers. In addition, we also verify the conclusions obtained from external datasets, molecular docking, and SqRT-PCR.
The results show that compared with normal lung tissue, BTG2 expression level was down-regulated and SerpinB5 was up-regulated in LUAD. Additionally, Kaplan–Meier survival analysis demonstrate that the prognosis of low expression level of BTG2 was poor, and that of high expression level of SerpinB5 was poor, suggesting that both of them can be used as independent prognostic factors. Moreover, the prognosis models of the two genes were constructed respectively in this study, and their prediction effect was verified by external data. Besides, ESTIMATE algorithm reveals the relationship between this gene pair and the immune microenvironment. Furthermore, patients with a high expression level of BTG2 and a low expression level of SerpinB5 have higher immunophenoscore for CTLA-4 and PD-1 inhibitors than patients with a low expression level of BTG2 and a high expression level of SerpinB5, indicating that such patients have a more obvious effect of immunotherapy.
Collectively, all the results demonstrate that BTG2 and SerpinB5 might serve as potential prognostic biomarkers and novel therapeutic targets for LUAD.