AUTHOR=Liu Wei , Zhang Jian , Xie Tao , Huang Xiaoting , Wang Baiyao , Tian Yunhong , Yuan Yawei 

TITLE=C1QTNF6 is a Prognostic Biomarker and Related to Immune Infiltration and Drug Sensitivity: A Pan-Cancer Analysis

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Pharmacology

VOLUME=13

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2022.855485

DOI=10.3389/fphar.2022.855485

ISSN=1663-9812

ABSTRACT=<p><bold>Background:</bold> The discovery of reliable cancer biomarkers could tune a diagnosis and improve the way patients are treated. However, many cancers lack robust biomarkers. <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> has been preliminarily elucidated for its role in some tumors. However, no pan-cancer analysis has been performed to comprehensively explore the value of <italic>C1QTNF6</italic>.</p><p><bold>Methods:</bold> Data from the TCGA database, GTEx database stored in the USUC Xena were used for analyzing the profiles of <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> expression in normal and tumor tissues in pan-cancer. Subsequently, the gene alteration rates of <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> were acquired on the online web cBioportal. With the aid of the TCGA data, the association between <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> mRNA expression and copy number alterations (CNA) and methylation was determined. Survival analyses of <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> were carried out. Moreover, the tumor biological and immunological characteristics of <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> were clarified in the forms of the correlation between <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> expression and hallmark Pathway scores in MsigDB database, immune cell infiltration, immune-related genes. We conducted a GSEA of <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> to illustrate its potential biological functions. In addition, GDSC2 data with 198 drugs were adopted to explore drug sensitivity with the change of <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> expression.</p><p><bold>Result:</bold><italic>C1QTNF6</italic> was overexpressed in many types of cancer, Survival analysis showed that <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> independently served as a prognostic indicator for poor survival in many tumors. Besides, we also identified a positive correlation between <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> and cancer hallmark pathway score, tumor microenvironment related pathways score (TMEp score), and immune characteristic. In terms of drug sensitivity analysis, we found higher expression level of <italic>C1QTNF6</italic> predicts a high IC50 value for most of 198 drugs which predicts drug resistance.</p><p><bold>Conclusions:</bold> Our study provides a new biological marker for pan-cancer, which is beneficial to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, which bring a new therapeutic target for tumors.</p>