Comprehensive Analysis of the Expression, Relationship to Immune Infiltration and Prognosis of TIM-1 in Cancer

• Published in: Frontiers in oncology Vol. 10; p. 1086
• Main Authors: Kong, Xiaoxiao, Fu, Meili, Niu, Xing, Jiang, Hongxing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A 04.09.2020
• Subjects: bioinformatics; biomarker; cancer; immune infiltration; Oncology; TIM-1
• ISSN: 2234-943X; 2234-943X
• DOI: 10.3389/fonc.2020.01086

TIM-1 is a critical gene that regulates T-helper cell development. However, little research has revealed the distribution, prognosis, and immune infiltration of TIM-1 in cancers. TCGA, GEO, Oncomine, TIMER, Kaplan-Meier, PrognoScan, GEPIA, TISIDB, and HPA databases were used to analyze TIM-1 in cancers. High TIM-1 expression was observed in bladder, cholangio, head and neck, colorectal, gastric, kidney, liver, lung adenocarcinoma, skin, uterine corpus endometrial, and pancreatic cancers compared to the normal tissues, and immunofluorescence shows that TIM-1 is mainly localized in vesicles. Simultaneously, high TIM-1 expression was closely related with poorer overall survival in gastric, lung adenocarcinoma, and poorer disease-specific survival in gastric cancer in the TCGA cohort, and was validated in the GEO cohort. Moreover, high expression of TIM-1, correlated with clinical relevance of gastric cancer and lung adenocarcinoma, was associated with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in lung adenocarcinoma and gastric cancer. Finally, immunohistochemistry showed TIM-1 expression was higher in lung adenocarcinoma and gastric cancer compared to the normal tissues. In summary, we applied integrated bioinformatics approaches to suggest that TIM-1 can be used as a prognostic biomarker in gastric and lung adenocarcinoma, which might provide a novel direction to explore the pathogenesis of gastric and lung adenocarcinoma.