Abstract
Background
Breast cancer (BC), one of the most prevalent malignancies, is the second major cause
of mortality from cancer among women worldwide. Even though substantial progress has
been made in breast cancer treatment, metastasis still accounts for the majority of
the deaths. The tumor microenvironment (TME) comprising stromal and non-stromal components
is central to tumor growth and development and is partly regulated by chemokines.
Chemokines regulate immune cell trafficking, the development of stroma and play a
key role in inflammation, a cancer hallmark.
Methods
In the present study, we used a bioinformatics approach to identify highly deregulated
chemokines in BC patients. We performed expression analysis, survival analysis, gene
ontology analysis, KEGG analysis, and protein-protein interaction network analysis
of the deregulated chemokines using Gepia2, UALCAN, Kaplan-Meier Plotter, DAVID, and
STRING tools.
Results
We identified >2-fold change (FC) increase in CXCL9/10/11/13 and >-2 FC decrease in
CCL14/21/28, CXCL2/12 CX3CL1. Also, increased expression of CCL14, CCL21, CXCL13,
CXCL9, CXCL12 correlated with better overall survival (OS) of BC patients.
Conclusions
Our results strongly indicate that chemokines may have potential biomarker characteristics,
and the constructed PPI network contributed to an in-depth understanding of the chemokine
networks. The deregulated chemokines may prove to be therapeutic targets for the effective
management of BC.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: April 24, 2022
Accepted:
April 20,
2022
Received in revised form:
March 24,
2022
Received:
November 13,
2021
Identification
Copyright
© 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
