ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1607056
This article is part of the Research TopicIntegrating Molecular Mechanisms, Immunotherapy, and Drug Sensitivity in Cancer Immunology and OncologyView all 34 articles
SLFN11 Expression correlates with immune microenvironment and predicts prognosis in melanoma
Provisionally accepted
- 1Cancer Hospital, College of Medicine, Shantou University, Shantou, China
- 2First Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University Medical College, Shantou, Guangdong Province, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Schlafen family member 11 (SLFN11) has been implicated in cancer biology and immune modulation, but its expression patterns, prognostic value, and role in tumor immunity in melanoma remain incompletely defined. Through multi-omics analyses of public databases (The Human Protein Atlas, TIMER2, BEST) and functional validation, we characterized SLFN11 in melanoma. Its mRNA levels are reduced in skin cutaneous melanoma (SKCM) compared to normal skin, yet higher in metastatic lesions than in primary tumors. High SLFN11 expression correlates with favorable overall and progression-free survival across multiple independent melanoma cohorts, with consistent prognostic value across clinical subgroups (tumor stages, nodal/metastatic status). Multivariable Cox regression analysis, adjusting for factors like gender, age, and pathologic T/N/M stages, confirmed SLFN11 expression as an independent predictor of favorable overall survival. SLFN11 expression associates with enhanced infiltration of immune cells along with co-expression of immune checkpoint molecules. Furthermore, SLFN11 expression is associated with favorable prognosis in immunotherapy-treated patients. Functional assays show that SLFN11-overexpressing melanoma cells promote M0 macrophage polarization toward an M1 phenotype, enhance recruitment of macrophages and CD8⁺ T cells, and slightly increase CD8⁺ T cell cytotoxic activity. These findings provide evidence that SLFN11 is associated with immune microenvironment changes in melanoma, correlates with favorable prognosis, and may be linked to immunotherapy response, supporting its potential as a candidate biomarker and therapeutic target for further investigation.
Keywords: SLFN11, Melanoma, Immunotherapy, Therapeutic target, biomarker
Received: 07 Apr 2025; Accepted: 30 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zeng, Chen #, Fang, Wu, Jiang and Zhang. 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: Rendong Zhang, Cancer Hospital, College of Medicine, Shantou University, Shantou, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.