Abstract
Background. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a malignant tumor with poor prognosis. Immune checkpoint genes are considered novel tumor immunotherapy targets for many cancer types. Erythropoietin (EPO) is a protein secreted mainly in the liver and kidneys; in several cancer types, EPO expression stimulates tumor growth and corelates with patient survival. The study aimed to identify EPO as a prognostic biomarker correlated with immune infiltration in HCC. Methods. We investigated the correlation between EPO expression and HCC patient clinical characteristics using data from The Cancer Genome Atlas. The relationship between EPO expression and HCC patient survival was investigated using Kaplan–Meier analysis. We also used R (v.3.6.3) to analyze the correlation between EPO expression and immune infiltration in HCC. Results. We found that EPO expression was downregulated in HCC. Notably, EPO was upregulated in advanced-stage HCC and had a diagnostic value of 0.83 (p < 0.001) in HCC diagnosis. HCC patients with increased EPO expression had poor prognoses. Furthermore, altered EPO expression was associated with immune cell infiltration and immune checkpoint gene expression in HCC. Conclusions. EPO expression was positively correlated with hepatocellular carcinoma stage, and negatively correlated with patient prognosis, with influening HCC immune cell infiltration and checkpoint gene expression. EPO can be as both a potential prognostic biomarker and a novel potential treatment target for HCC.Our work is not a clinical trial, but preclinical basic study.
Overexpression of CENP-H as a novel prognostic biomarker for human hepatocellular carcinoma progression and patient survival
