CancerHallmarks.com: A tool for the enrichment analysis of the cancer hallmarks.

Abstract

e15079 Background: The "Hallmarks of Cancer" concept is a useful framework for understanding the fundamental principles that are shared among different types of cancers. However, the lack of agreement on a specific set of genes for these hallmarks makes it difficult to compare and integrate data, leading to varying interpretations of the biological processes involved in cancer across different studies. In this study, we created a consensus set of cancer hallmark genes by combining data from multiple mapping resources and the scientific literature. Methods: We identified 6,763 candidate cancer hallmark genes associated with ten cancer hallmarks by consolidating information from seven studies. There was a considerable variation in the number of genes within the available resources, ranging between 91 and 7,779. We observed a sizable variation in the number of genes connected to each hallmark. The number of genes across cancer hallmarks ranges between 574 („enabling replicative immortality”) and 3,574 ("sustaining proliferative signaling"). The least number of genes are associated with the more recent hallmarks, published in 2011, and the hallmarks „enabling replicative immortality” and „sustaining angiogenesis”. We identified six genes linked to each of the ten cancer hallmarks: TP53, AKT1, MAP2K1, CTNNB1, HRAS, and PIK3CB. Results: As a practical utility of the hallmark concept, we analyzed the enrichment of cancer hallmarks by evaluating genes associated with overall survival. Only genes with a false discovery rate below 0.01, a hazard rate over 1, and a cutoff value over 100 were analyzed to ensure sufficient robustness of the gene sets. The hallmark "genome instability" was most prominent in liver (p=1.0E-05), lung (p=1.0E-05), and pancreatic cancers (p=0.00164). Renal cancer had higher “invasion and metastasis” (p=0.002). Both pancreatic cancer and lung adenocarcinomas were enriched for “resisting cell death” (p=0.00096 and p=0.037, respectively). Overall, while eight cancer types had no significant hallmark enrichment among druggable genes, pancreatic cancers had the most enriched hallmarks (5 out of 10), emphasizing the disease's complexity. These results highlight the usefulness of the hallmark concept as a valuable tool for organizing information, especially in establishing a direct link between genes and biological functions. Conclusions: We have created a unified list of genes linked to cancer hallmarks. We integrated the data into an easily accessible online tool (accessible at www.cancerhallmarks.com) that enables users to identify the most pertinent cancer-associated “candidate hallmark genes” in their own datasets.