Research Paper|Volume 14, Issue 8|pp 3687—3704

F12 as a reliable diagnostic and prognostic biomarker associated with immune infiltration in papillary thyroid cancer

Jun-Hua Luo¹, Xiu-Xia Zhang¹, Wu-Hui Sun²

¹Department of Thyroid and Breast Surgery, Linping Campus, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou 311100, Zhejiang, China
²Department of Thyroid Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou 310009, Zhejiang, China

Received: February 18, 2022Accepted: April 14, 2022Published: April 28, 2022

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204037

Copyright: © 2022 Luo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Objective: To explore the function of coagulation factor XII (F12) in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC).

Materials and Methods: We assessed F12 expression and its relationship with overall survival (OS) in various cancers using TIMER and TISIDB databases. Further, we evaluated the mRNA and protein expression levels of F12 in PTC via different bioinformatics tools. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was applied to determine the diagnostic value of F12 in PTC. Then, the Kaplan-Meier plotter and Cox regression analyses were performed to examine the prognostic significance of F12. The possible mechanism of F12 in PTC was investigated through enrichment analyses. Finally, the correlation between F12 expression and immune cell infiltration was analyzed using TCGA data.

Results: This study revealed the clinical significance of F12 in various cancers. Higher mRNA (P <0.001) and protein expressions of F12 were observed in PTC compared with normal tissues. Besides, F12 expression exhibited high diagnostic performance in PTC and its overexpression served as an independent predictor for the poor OS (P <0.05). Enrichment analyses results showed that F12 was mainly involved in metabolism-associated pathways. Additionally, F12 expression was significantly linked to immune cell infiltration levels, especially macrophage infiltration.

Conclusions: F12 might be a reliable diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for PTC. Moreover, F12 expression might affect the OS of PTC patients via regulating metabolic pathways.