Cytotoxic lymphocytes-related gene ITK from a systematic CRISPR screen could predict prognosis of ovarian cancer patients with distant metastasis

BACKGROUND: Ovarian cancer, a highly metastatic malignancy, has benefited tremendously from advances in modern human genomics. However, the genomic variations related to the metastasis remains unclear. METHODS: We filtered various significant genes (n = 6722) associated with metastasis within a large-scale functional genomic CRISPR/Cas9 knock-out library including 122,756 single guide RNAs, and identified ITK (IL2 Inducible T Cell Kinase) as a potential cancer suppressor gene for ovarian cancer metastasis. Downstream bioinformatic analysis was performed for ITK using public databases. RESULTS: We found that patients in low-ITK group had poor prognosis and more distant metastasis than those in high-ITK group in TCGA and GEO databases. We also demonstrated that ITK combined with the clinical factors could accurately predict prognosis through multiple Cox regression analysis and ROC analysis. Moreover, alterations correlated with distant metastasis emereged with significantly increased expression in SAMRCD1 in low-ITK group, but CD244 and SOCS1 in high-ITK group. Integrated analysis revealed dysregulated molecular processes including predominantly oncogenic signaling pathways in low-ITK group but immune related pathways in high-ITK group, which suggested ITK might inhibit distant metastasis in ovarian cancer. Furtherly, deconvolution of the cellular composition of all samples validated the close correlation between ITK and immune related function especially for cytotoxic lymphocytes. CONCLUSIONS: Together, these data provide insights into the potential role of ITK, with implications for the future development of tansformative ovarian cancer therapeutics. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12967-021-03119-3.