Identification of hub genes predicting sensitivity to neoadjuvant chemoradiation in locally advanced rectal cancer
Article Category: Research Article
Published Online: Aug 06, 2025
Page range: 435 - 449
Received: Jun 12, 2024
Accepted: Oct 28, 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/raon-2025-0005
Keywords
© 2025 Qunye Zhao et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Background
Preoperative neoadjuvant chemoradiation (NACR) benefits disease control in most locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) patients. However, effective biomarkers predicting response to NACR are still not accessible. This study aimed to find potential biomarkers to assess therapy response and susceptibility to LARC.
Materials and methods
Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between NACR-sensitive and resistant patients were screened using GEO database. STRING and Cytoscape were utilized to construct PPI networks and identify hub genes. Based on CIBERSORT, TCGA, GTEx, GSEA and ROC curves, the connections between hub genes and specific signaling pathways, immune cell infiltration, prognosis value and miRNA-transcription factor (TF)-target network were investigated. Human Protein Atlas (HPA) database was used to visualize hub gene expression in clinical samples.
Results
We identified 2619 up- and 2466 down-regulated genes between NACR-sensitive and resistant patients. The up-regulated DEGs were searched for highly expressed genes in the NACR-resistant, TCGA and GTEx-related datasets compared to the NACR-sensitive group, yielding six hub genes (
Conclusions
This study identified six hub genes (