Identification of prognostic and therapeutic value of CC chemokines in Urothelial bladder cancer: evidence from comprehensive bioinformatic analysis

BACKGROUND: Urothelial bladder cancer (BC) is one of the most prevalent malignancies with high mortality and high recurrence rate. Angiogenesis, tumor growth and metastasis of multiple cancers are partly modulated by CC chemokines. However, we know little about the function of distinct CC chemokines in BC. METHODS: ONCOMINE, Gene Expression Profiling Interactive Analysis (GEPIA), Kaplan–Meier plotter, cBioPortal, GeneMANIA, and TIMER were used for analyzing differential expression, prognostic value, protein–protein interaction, genetic alteration and immune cell infiltration of CC chemokines in BC patients based on bioinformatics. RESULTS: The results showed that transcriptional levels of CCL2/3/4/5/14/19/21/23 in BC patients were significantly reduced. A significant relation was observed between the expression of CCL2/11/14/18/19/21/23/24/26 and the pathological stage of BC patients. BC patients with high expression levels of CCL1, CCL2, CCL3, CCL4, CCL5, CCL8, CCL13, CCL15, CCL17, CCL18, CCL19, CCL22, CCL25, CCL27 were associated with a significantly better prognosis. Moreover, we found that differentially expressed CC chemokines are primarily correlated with cytokine activity, chemokines receptor binding, chemotaxis, immune cell migration. Further, there were significant correlations among the expression of CC chemokines and the infiltration of several types of immune cells (B cells, CD8+ T cells, CD4+ T cells, macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells). CONCLUSIONS: This study is an analysis to the potential role of CC chemokines in the therapeutic targets and prognostic biomarkers of BC, which gives a novel insight into the relationship between CC chemokines and BC.