The role of CXCL10 in prognosis of patients with colon cancer and tumor microenvironment remodeling

BACKGROUNG: Tumor microenvironment (TME) has gradually emerged as an important research topic in the fight against cancer. The immune system is a major contributing factor in TME, and investigations have revealed that tumors are partially infiltrated with numerous immune cell subsets. METHOD: We obtained transcriptome RNA-seq data from the the Cancer Genome Atlas databases for 521 patients with colon adenocarcinoma (COAD). ESTIMATE algorithms are then used to estimate the fraction of stromal and immune cells in COAD samples. RESULT: A total of 1109 stromal-immune score-related differentially expressed genes were identified and used to generate a high-confidence protein–protein interaction network and univariate COX regression analysis. C-X-C motif chemokine 10 (CXCL10) was identified as the core gene by intersection analysis of data from protein–protein interaction network and univariate COX regression analysis. Then, for CXCL10, we performed gene set enrichment analysis, survival analysis and clinical analysis, and we used CIBERSORT algorithms to estimate the proportion of tumor-infiltrating immune cells in COAD samples. CONCLUSION: We discovered that CXCL10 levels could be effective for predicting the prognosis of COAD patients as well as a clue that the status of TME is transitioning from immunological to metabolic activity, which provided additional information for COAD therapies.