Identification of Survival-Associated Hub Genes in Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma Based on WGCNA

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death worldwide. Since little clinical symptoms were shown in the early period of pancreatic adenocarcinoma, most patients were found to carry metastases when diagnosis. The lack of effective diagnosis biomarkers and therapeutic targets makes pancreatic adenocarcinoma difficult to screen and cure. The fundamental problem is we know very little about the regulatory mechanisms during carcinogenesis. Here, we employed weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) to build gene interaction network using expression profile of pancreatic adenocarcinoma from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). STRING was used for the construction and visualization of biological networks. A total of 22 modules were detected in the network, among which yellow and pink modules showed the most significant associations with pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Dozens of new genes including PKMYT1, WDHD1, ASF1B, and RAD18 were identified. Further survival analysis yielded their valuable effects on the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Our study pioneered network-based algorithm in the application of tumor etiology and discovered several promising regulators for pancreatic adenocarcinoma detection and therapy.