Upregulated Ly-6 gene expression is associated with poor overall survival in uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma patients

Abstract

Abstract The human Ly-6 (hLy-6) gene family has recently gained interest for its possible role in tumor progression. High expression of hLy-6 genes is associated with poor overall survival in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma patients. To expand upon this work, we have carried out in silico analyses of all known hLy-6 gene expression in other cancers using TNMplot which shows differential gene expression in cancer tissues. We have also analyzed the patient survival by Kaplan-Meier plotter after mining the TCGA database. We report that upregulated expression of several hLy-6 genes is associated with poor cancer patient survival in many other cancer types, especially uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma (UCEC). Importantly, the expression of a number of hLy-6 genes is elevated in UCEC tissue when compared to the expression in normal uterine tissue. Further analysis of tumor-specific expression of the hLy-6 gene family is needed to uncover the function of Ly-6 proteins as well as the signaling pathways these proteins trigger that endow tumor survival and poor patient prognosis. Human Ly-6 gene products can potentially be used as biomarkers for cancer detection and as tumor associated antigens to identify high-risk cancer patients and appropriately design and/or calibrate cancer treatments for such patients.