Comprehensive pan-cancer analysis indicates key gene of p53independent apoptosis is a novel biomarker for clinical application and chemotherapy in colorectal cancer

Jianing Yan ¹ Jingzhi Wang ² Min Miao ^1* Yongfu Shao ^1*

• ¹ Affiliated Hospital, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China
• ² Yancheng First People's Hospital, Yancheng, Jiangsu, China

Background: Schlafen11 (SLFN11) is a key gene in p53-independent apoptosis through ribosome stalling; however, systematic research has been conducted on its role in the tumor immune microenvironment, clinical application, and immunotherapy response across pan-cancer.Method: Public data were downloaded and multi-omics approaches were used to investigate the relationship between the expression level of SLFN11 and spatial position, biological function, immune landscape, and clinical application values. Cell Counting Kit-8 assay and quantitative realtime PCR were used to validate the expression level of SLFN11 and drug sensitivity in colorectal cancer samples.Result: Our study revealed that SLFN11 was downregulated in most cancers and correlated with DNA repair, the P53 pathway and immune response in tumor development progress by multi-omics analysis. Dysregulated SLFN11 is accompanied by several immune cell infiltrations and immunerelated regulators, which can be a promising screening and prognostic biomarker and chemotherapy predictive target for clinical application. In vitro experiments proved that downregulated SLFN11 is a useful diagnostic biomarker and is linked to imatinib resistance in colorectal cancer.The expression level of SLFN11 has a substantial promise as a valuable biomarker for diagnosis and a predictive indicator for assessing the effectiveness of chemotherapy and immunotherapy in human cancers, which deserves further additional basic experiments and clinical trials to prove.