Expression of ASPN with Prognostic Values in Gastric Cancer: A Study Based on TCGA Data

Abstract Objective: Gastric ancer is a common cancer with high cancer-related death in the world Although, ASPN has been reported as a potential biomarker in some cancers, the relationship of ASPN and clinical pathologic features in gastric cancer has not been investigated thoroughly. Thus, the aim of study is to evaluate the function of ASPN in gastric cancer based on TCGA. Materials and methods: The gene expression data (407 cases, Workflow Type: HTSeq-Counts) and corresponding clinical information were downloaded from the TCGA Genomic Data Commons data portal. We performed the NES and nominal p value to evaluate the pathways enriched in each phenotype. Then, we analyzed the association with ASPN and clinicopathologic variables based on Wilcoxon signed-rank test and logistic regression. Result: We found that it was significantly different in ASPN expression between gastric cancer and normal tissue (P<0.001). High ASPN expression was significantly associated with high stage (Odds ratio (OR)=3.656 for stage II vs stage I and OR=0.014 for stage III vs stage I), T classification (OR=13.304 for T2 vs T1, OR=20.769 for T3 vs T1 and OR=24.857 for T4 vs T1) (all p-values< 0.05). Univariate analysis revealed ASPN could result in poor overall survival with HR=1.004 and P=0.036. Besides, multivariate analysis indicated that ASPN expression was an independent risk factor for overall survival (HR:1.010, P=0.000), age (HR: 1.046, P=0.002) and gender (HR: 1.623, P=0.026). Besides, GSEA results showed that Pentose phosphate pathway, Base excision repair, Peroxisome, Protesome, Nucleotide excision repair, and Mismatch repair were differentially enriched in gastric cancer with high ASPN expression phentype. Conclusion: ASPN expression is higher in gastric cancer than normal tissues, and considered ASPN as a potential independent molecular marker for diagnosis and prognosis of GC.