AUTHOR=Wang Yange , Shi He , Zhang Yulu , Zeng Qian , Chen Tingmei , Chai Chengsen 

TITLE=Identification of Differentially Expressed Hub Genes Associated With Immune Cell Recruitment in Claudin-Low Breast Cancer

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Oncology

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2022.848206

DOI=10.3389/fonc.2022.848206

ISSN=2234-943X

ABSTRACT=Breast cancer (BCa) is the most common malignancy in women and claudin-low breast cancer (CL-BCa) is a newly-identified BCa subtype characterized by low expression of claudin 3&4&7. However, the hub genes  associated with the recruitment of immune cells into CL-BCa were rarely described. This study aimed to explore the differentially-expressed hub genes associated with tumor-infiltrating immune cells in CL-BCa by a multi-approaches bioinformatics analysis. Top 200 genes associated with CL-BCa were screened in METABRIC dataset; PPI network was constructed using STRING and Cytoscape; tumor-infiltrating immune cells were analyzed by TIMER 2.0; the correlation of feature cytokines and claudins on survival was examined in METABRIC and TCGA datasets. Consequently, we found that the fraction of tumor-infiltrating immune cells, especially CD8+T cells and macrophages, increased in the CL-BCa. Differentially-expressed cytokines (CCL5, CCL19, CXCL9 and CXCL10) and claudins (CLDN8, CLDN11 and CLDN19) were related to the overall survival and their expression levels were also examined both in tumor tissues of CL-BCa patients by IHC and in typical CL-BCa cell lines by qPCR. Finally, the BCa patients with high expression of these DEGs (CCL5, CCL19, CXCL9, CLDN8 and CLDN11) showed a better overall survival. This study sheds light on molecular features of CL-BCa on immune microenvironments and contributes to identification of prognosis biomarkers for the CL-BCa patients.