INSC Is a Prognosis-Associated Biomarker Involved in Tumor Immune Infiltration in Colon Adenocarcinoma

AIMS: The purpose of this study was to investigate the correlation of INSC gene with the level of immune infiltration and clinical prognosis in colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS: INSC expression profile data and clinicopathological information of COAD patients were downloaded from TCGA. Xiantao bioinformatics tool was used to analyze the expression of INSC between the COAD group and the normal control group, and GEPIA2 was used to analyze the top 100 coexpressed genes. Logistic regression analysis was performed to assess the relationship between clinicopathological features and INSC. The Kaplan-Meier method and Cox regression model were used to perform the survival analysis. CIBERSORT algorithm was used to analyze the relationship between INSC expression and immune infiltration cells. RESULTS: The expression level of INSC in COAD was significantly downregulated. The result of logistic regression analysis confirmed that tumor stage was the final influencing factor of INSC expression. The overall survival rate of INSC in the high expression group was higher than that of the low expression group, and it was an independent risk factor of prognosis. Enrichment results indicated that INSC was enriched in the regulation of T-helper 2 cell differentiation pathway. Immune infiltration analysis showed that INSC expression was positively correlated with the B cell plasma, T cell CD4+ memory resting, activated myeloid dendritic cells, and eosinophils. CONCLUSIONS: Our study found that the expression of INSC was significantly downregulated in COAD, which regulated immune-infiltrating cells during cancer development and was associated with malignant progression in COAD patients.