Abstract
Available evidence suggests that human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection may be implicated in the progression of colorectal cancer (CRC). However, the correlation between HCMV infection and survival outcomes in CRC patients is unclear. Here, we constructed a flow algorithm to identify HCMV sequences based on the RNA-seq data of CRC patients derived from Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). The patients' clinical information matrix was used to calculate Euclidean distance to filter out suitable patients not infected with HCMV, combining with the patient's survival outcome to reveal how HCMV infection is involved in CRC progression.HCMV infection is widespread in CRC patients., The prevalence of HCMV infection is ranging from 10% to 36% in 4 independent CRC datasets with infection being concentrated in carcinoma tissue rather than in normal tissue. In addition, HCMV positive patients had a poor survival prognosis, with three of the HCMV genes associated with poor patient survival outcomes, UL82, UL42 and UL117. Most importantly, we suppose that the regulation of immune function by HCMV may be the key to the poor prognosis of CRC patients. We found that HCMV infection was associated with poor prognosis in CRC patients and identified three prognosis associated HCMV genes. The regulation of immune function caused by HCMV infection was the key factor while HCMV positive CRC patients mostly presented a state of immunosuppression. This may provide new ideas for personalized treatment of CRC patients, especially in immunotherapy.
Tumoral presence of human cytomegalovirus is associated with shorter disease-free survival in elderly patients with colorectal cancer and higher levels of intratumoral interleukin-17
