<i>MMP14</i> is a diagnostic gene of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma associated with immune cell infiltration
Jun Wu, Yang Guo, Zhifan Zuo, Ziwei Zhu, Lei Han
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) is a malignant tumor of the hepatobiliary system with concealed onset, strong invasiveness and poor prognosis. AIM: To explore the disease characteristic genes that may be helpful in the diagnosis of ICC and affect immune cell infiltration. METHODS: We downloaded two ICC-related human gene expression profiles from GEO database as the training group (GSE26566 and GSE32958 datasets) for difference analysis, and performed enrichment analysis on differential genes. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), support vector machine-recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) and random forest (RF), three machine learning algorithms, were used to screen the characteristic genes. Double verification was carried out on GSE107943 and The Cancer Genome Atlas, two verification groups. Receiver operating characteristic curve and area under the curve (AUC) were used to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of genes for ICC. CIBERSORT and ssGSEA algorithms were used to evaluate the effect of characteristic genes on immune infiltration pattern. Human Protein Atlas (HPA) was used to analyze the protein expression level of the target gene. RESULTS: could affect the infiltration of monocytes, activated memory CD4 T cells, resting memory CD4 T cells, and other immune cells, and was closely related to the expression of CD200, cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen 4, CD14, CD44, and other immune checkpoints. The results of immunohistochemistry in HPA database showed was indeed overexpressed in ICC. CONCLUSION: can be used as a disease characteristic gene of ICC, and may regulate the distribution of immune-infiltrating cells in the ICC tumor microenvironment, which provides a new method for the determination of ICC diagnostic markers and screening of therapeutic targets.