A Pan-cancer Analysis Reveals the Tissue Specificity and Prognostic Impact of Angiogenesis-associated Genes in Human Cancers

Abstract

Introduction: Angiogenesis is one of the hallmarks of cancer and can impact the processes of cancer initiation, progression, and response to therapy. Background: Anti-angiogenic therapy is thus an encouraging therapeutic option to treat cancers, but the detailed angiogenic mechanisms and the association between angiogenesis and clinical outcome remain unknown in different cancers. Methods: Here, we systematically assess the impacts of 82 angiogenesis-associated genes (AAGs) in tumor tissue specificity and prognosis across 16 cancer types. Results: Results demonstrate that the expression patterns of the 82 AAGs can reflect the tumor tissue specificity, and high expressions of up-regulated AAGs are significantly associated with poor prognosis of cancer. We further define a prognostic score for predicting overall survival (OS) based on the expressions of up-regulated AAGs and confirm its reliable predictive ability. Results indicate that a low prognostic score demonstrates a superior OS and vice versa. Conclusion: The results of this study will contribute to the understanding of different tumor angiogenesis mechanisms in various tissues and cancer-personalized anti-angiogenic treatment. The code of our analysis can be accessed at https://github.com/ZhenshenBao/AAGs_analysis.git.