Clinical and Biological Significances of FBLN5 in Gastric Cancer

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of high expression of FBLN5 on the prognosis of gastric cancer (GC) patients. FBLN5, as a member of the fibrin family, regulates important biological processes related to cancer occurrence and development and has been proven to play an important role in a variety of cancers. However, the roles of FBLN5 in GC have not been studied to date. Therefore, we preliminarily explored the influence of FBLN5 on the progression of GC by combining biological information analysis technology and basic experiments and confirmed that FBLN5 has good application value in evaluating the prognosis of GC patients, thereby providing a reference for later in-depth study of FBLN5. ABSTRACT: Abnormal FBLN5 expression levels are related to various cancer types. This study is the first to explore its clinical and biological significances in gastric cancer (GC). We used The Cancer Genome Atlas-GC (TCGA-GC) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases to identify the differential expression of FBLN5, and its association with clinical pathological characteristics was analyzed. A Kaplan–Meier plotter was used to calculate the impact of FBLN5 on GC patient prognosis, and the biological functions of FBLN5 were analyzed. In addition, we constructed a GC tissue microarray, and performed an immunohistochemical staining of FBLN5 to verify our findings. Western blotting was conducted simultaneously to confirm that FBLN5 was overexpressed in GC. We found that the high level of FBLN5 mRNA in GC was associated with a poor prognosis. High FBLN5 expression levels were significantly correlated with INFc and N3 lymph node metastasis. Univariate and multivariate analyses showed that FBLN5 expression levels and lymph node metastasis rate were independent risk factors related to GC patient prognosis, which can be combined to construct a nomogram to serve patients. Therefore, we believe that FBLN5 is significantly related to the poor prognosis of GC patients. FBLN5 is a valuable prognostic indicator to evaluate the prognosis of GC.