Prognostic and immune-related value of STK17B in skin cutaneous melanoma

Xueying Shi,Qi Zhou,Bingqian Huang,Yuankuan Jiang,Jingrong Lin,Shifeng Fang,Shilin Xia,Salvatore V Pizzo

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0263311

Abstract

Skin cutaneous melanoma (SKCM) is a common cancer of which mortality is increasing continuously. Our study conducted a series of analyses on the clinical significance of Serine/threonine kinase 17B (STK17B) in SKCM to provide a new biomarker for diagnosis and treatment. The RNA-sequence data were obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas and Genotype-Tissue Expression databases. The data of 468 SKCM patients were divided into STK17B high- and low-expression groups and analyzed by Bioconductor package to identify the differential expressed genes. The R package of “clusterProfiler” was used for Gene Ontology, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, and Gene-Set Enrichment Analysis analyses. A protein-protein interaction network and immune infiltration landscape were respectively constructed via STRING database and ssGSEA. STK17B had lower expression in SKCM than normal tissues. Besides, STK17B expression was significantly related to some clinicopathological characteristics in SKCM patients including T stage, Breslow depth, radiation therapy, melanoma Clark level, and pathologic stage. The Kaplan-Meier curve analyses revealed that the low expression of STK17B was correlated with poor overall survival and disease-specific survival. We constructed nomograms to predict the 1-, 3-, and 5-year survival of SKCM patients. The function enrichment analyses showed STK17B-related differential expressed genes were enriched in cellular differentiation and immune-related progress. STK17B expression level were positively correlated with infiltrating level of immune cells. In this study, we found that STK17B, which played an important role in immune infiltration, could be a new biomarker for diagnosis and prognosis in SKCM patients.

Highlights

Skin cutaneous melanoma (SKCM) is one of the most malignant skin tumors, which can both locally invade surrounding tissues as well as metastasize systemically
The RNA-Seq data of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) database were downloaded from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) XENA, which were handled by the Toil process and transformed into transcripts per million reads [7]
We explored the expression differences of Serine/threonine kinase 17B (STK17B) in 33 human cancers and corresponding normal tissues based on the TCGA and UCSC data sets

Summary

Introduction

Skin cutaneous melanoma (SKCM) is one of the most malignant skin tumors, which can both locally invade surrounding tissues as well as metastasize systemically. The morbidity of SKCM is only 4% to 11% of all skin cancers but the mortality of SKCM is close to three quarters of total fatality rate from skin tumors [2]. A main risk factor of melanoma is ultraviolet radiation. SKCM can appear in non-sun-exposed area, such as feet, mouth, and nasal passages, caused by dysplastic naevi or hereditary factors [3]. Immunotherapy and targeted therapies are used clinically. Untreated stage IV patients survive less than one year, it is urgent to find novel and effective targets for clinical research and therapeutic method [4]

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Results

Conclusion