The molecular mechanisms of CTHRC1 in gastric cancer by integrating TCGA, GEO and GSA datasets

Collagen triple helix repeat containing-1 (CTHRC1), highly expressed in multiple human solid tumors, has been identified as a tumor associated protein. However, its specific role and mechanism with immune infiltrates in gastric cancer are still unclear. In this study, we systematically explored and validated the expression and prognostic value of CTHRC1 in gastric cancer by integrating the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and Genome Sequence Archive (GSA) datasets. Compared to adjacent normal tissues, we observed that CTHRC1 was highly overexpressed in tumor sample of multiple cancers. It was revealed that CTHRC1 overexpression was positively correlated with the T stage in gastric cancer but not lymph nodes metastasis from TCGA dataset. In addition, CTHRC1 expression may induce tumor associated macrophage infiltration though GRN/TNFRSF1A and AnxA1/FPR1 pathways and also tumor angiogenesis in gastric cancer. In this context, our results indicate that CTHRC1 plays a pivotal role in regulating the angiogenesis and macrophage infiltration in tumor microenvironment, and also can predict poor prognosis in gastric cancer, suggesting that CTHRC1 might be a promising novel immunotherapy and angiogenesis target for gastric cancer.