Computational identification of key pathways and differentially-expressed gene signatures in ovarian cancer stem cells

Abstract

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are a tumor cell type capable of self-renewal and differentiation and believed to be responsible for metastasis, therapy resistance, and tumor relapse. Therefore, targeting CSCs could be a promising therapy strategy to improve the outcome of cancer patients, and this requires accurate identification of CSCs from the tumors and better characterize this cell population in terms of stemness maintenance. In the present study, we sought to establish a pathway and gene signature in epithelial ovarian CSCs. Using three publicly available datasets from the Gene expression omnibus (GEO), we identified several common, potentially regulatory pathways and differentially-expressed genes that could be used to characterize and identify ovarian CSCs. Several established signaling pathways, such as the MAPK pathway and the Wnt pathway, were found to be enriched in ovarian CSCs. In addition, we found that the axon guidance pathway is also enriched in ovarian CSCs, suggesting a novel regulatory mechanism in the maintenance of this cell population. We also identified four genes, ITGBl, TUBB2B, CXCL2, and SORBS2, that are differentially expressed in ovarian CSCs across all three GEO datasets, indicating that this gene expression signature might be used to identify CSCs in epithelial ovarian cancers.