Prognostic Roles of Phosphofructokinase Platelet in Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma and Correlation with Immune Infiltration

Bin Liu; Faping Li; Mingdi Liu; Zhixiang Xu; Baoshan Gao; Yishu Wang; Honglan Zhou

doi:10.2147/IJGM.S321337

Prognostic Roles of Phosphofructokinase Platelet in Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma and Correlation with Immune Infiltration

Int J Gen Med. 2021 Jul 20:14:3645-3658. doi: 10.2147/IJGM.S321337. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Bin Liu¹, Faping Li¹, Mingdi Liu², Zhixiang Xu², Baoshan Gao¹, Yishu Wang², Honglan Zhou¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Urology, the First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, 130021, Jilin, People's Republic of China.
² Key Laboratory of Pathobiology, Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Changchun, 130021, Jilin, People's Republic of China.

Abstract

Background: Abnormal expression of phosphofructokinase platelet (PFKP) has been reported in various cancer types. However, the role of PFKP in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) remains unclear.

Methods: In this study, the PFKP expression levels in various cancers were systemically described by integrating multiple kinds of publicly available databases. The relationship between PFKP expression and clinical prognosis of ccRCC patients was analyzed based on the TCGA database. Furthermore, PFKP-related genes and the top 10 hub genes were identified. The enrichment analysis, PPI network, and the relationship between PFKP and tumor-infiltrating immune cells were conducted to explore why PFKP was associated with clinical outcomes in ccRCC patients.

Results: PFKP was significantly highly expressed in kidney cancer, especially in ccRCC. Moreover, patients with low expression of PFKP were correlated with poor 5-year and 10-year overall survival (OS) (P < 0.05). Low PFKP expression was a risk factor associated with decreased OS in subgroups including males, females, grade 3-4, and stage III-IV (all P < 0.05). GO and KEGG enrichment analyses showed that 10 hub genes were mainly enriched in the tumor immune response. Finally, PFKP expression level was highly correlated with the infiltration of B cell, CD8⁺ T cell, CD4⁺ T cell, macrophage, neutrophil, and dendritic cell.

Conclusion: In short, our findings suggested that PFKP is highly expressed in ccRCC significantly and facilitated tumor immune response which in turn associated with a good prognosis.

Keywords: biological function enrichment analyses; clear cell renal cell carcinoma; phosphofructokinase platelet; prognosis; tumor immune infiltrating cells.

Grants and funding

This study in the authors’ laboratory was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 81970648) and International Cooperation Project of the Department of Science and Technology of Jilin Province (Nos. 20180101162JC and 20190701049GH).