ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Genet.

Sec. Cancer Genetics and Oncogenomics

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fgene.2025.1586287

Expression Characteristics, Molecular Mechanisms, and Clinical Significance of DICER1 in Breast Cancer

Provisionally accepted
Xi  ZhangXi ZhangLong  YuLong YuCuizhi  GengCuizhi Geng*
  • The Fourth Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Objective: This study aims to investigate the expression patterns, molecular mechanisms, and clinical significance of DICER1 in breast cancer (BRCA), providing new biomarkers and therapeutic targets for prognosis assessment and personalized treatment of breast cancer. Methods: By integrating RNA-seq data, clinical data, and tumor mutation burden (TMB) data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, as well as single-cell transcriptomic data from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, we analyzed the expression characteristics of DICER1 in breast cancer. Weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) was used to identify gene modules associated with the breast cancer phenotype, and gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was performed to explore their biological functions. Cellular experiments were conducted to verify the effects of DICER1 on the proliferation, migration, and invasion of breast cancer cells. A nomogram model was constructed based on clinical data to evaluate its prognostic value. Additionally, the effects of DICER1 expression levels on drug sensitivity and the tumor immune microenvironment were analyzed.The expression of DICER1 in breast cancer tissues was significantly lower than that in normal tissues, and was significantly correlated with tumor stage, T stage, and TMB levels. The expression level of DICER1 was an independent prognostic factor for breast cancer patients. The nomogram model based on DICER1 expression and clinical features demonstrated good discriminative ability in predicting patient survival probability. Drug sensitivity analysis revealed that the high-expression group of DICER1 exhibited higher sensitivity to multiple drugs. Immune microenvironment analysis indicated that the low-expression group of DICER1 had higher immune-suppressive features and immune exclusion scores, suggesting potential resistance to immunotherapy. Single-cell transcriptomic analysis revealed heterogeneous expression of DICER1 in breast cancer cell populations and its potential role in cell-cell communication. Conclusion: DICER1 plays an important regulatory role in breast cancer, with its expression level closely related to tumor progression, the immune microenvironment, and drug sensitivity. DICER1 has the potential to become an important biomarker for prognosis assessment in breast cancer and may provide new targets for future immunotherapy and targeted therapy.

Keywords: breast cancer (BrCa), DIcer1, Tumor mutation burden (TMB), prognostic biomarker, immune microenvironment, drug sensitivity

Received: 02 Mar 2025; Accepted: 09 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Yu and Geng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Cuizhi Geng, The Fourth Hospital of Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, China

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