A malignant prognostic indicator of Uterine Corpus Endometrial Carcinoma: CDKN2A

Abstract

Mounting evidence have proved that the expression level of CHKN2A has a certain influence on the immune infiltration of tumor and the prognosis of cancer patients. Nevertheless, the association between CDKN2A and Uterine Corpus Endometrial Carcinoma (UCEC) still remains unclear. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the effects of CDKN2A on the prognosis of UCEC patients and its relationship with immune infiltration. ONCOMINE, GEPIA 2, Kaplan-Meier Plotter, TIMER2.0, Metascape, STRING and cBioPortal were used in this study to explore the influence of CDKN2A expression on UCEC. Compared to adjacent normal tissue, we demonstrated that high CDKN2A expression was associated with poor survival of UCEC patients (OS:HR=2.9, Logrank p=0.0055; DFS:HR=2.3, Log rank p=0.016). Meanwhile, significant correlation between CDKN2A expression and immune infiltration was observed in UCEC tumor tissue, such as CD8+ T cells (R=-0.431, P=2.72E-05) and Monocyte (R=0.295, P=5.20E-03) etc. In addition, the enrichment analysis results showed that CDKN2A and its co-expressed genes were involved in the pathways of RNA metabolism, positive regulation of cell cycle process and TP53 activity. The main gene alteration of CDKN2A in UCEC patients was amplification, and the mutation rate was only 3%. In conclusion, CDKN2A is expected to become a novel prognostic indicator and a potential drug target for UCEC.