Granata, I.; Barboro, P. Identification of Molecular Markers Associated with Prostate Cancer Subtypes: An Integrative Bioinformatics Approach. Biomolecules2024, 14, 87.
Granata, I.; Barboro, P. Identification of Molecular Markers Associated with Prostate Cancer Subtypes: An Integrative Bioinformatics Approach. Biomolecules 2024, 14, 87.
Granata, I.; Barboro, P. Identification of Molecular Markers Associated with Prostate Cancer Subtypes: An Integrative Bioinformatics Approach. Biomolecules2024, 14, 87.
Granata, I.; Barboro, P. Identification of Molecular Markers Associated with Prostate Cancer Subtypes: An Integrative Bioinformatics Approach. Biomolecules 2024, 14, 87.
Abstract
Prostate cancer (PCa) is characterised by androgen-dependency. Unfortunately, under anti-androgen treatment pressure, castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) emerges, characterised by heterogeneous cell populations that, over time, lead to the development of different androgen-dependent or -independent phenotypes. Despite important advances in therapeutic strategies, CRPC remains incurable. Context-specific essential genes represent valuable candidates for targeted anti-cancer therapies.
Through the investigation of gene and protein annotations and the integration of several published transcriptomic data, we identified two consensus lists to stratify PCa patients' risk and discriminate CRPC phenotypes based on androgen receptor activity. ROC and Kaplan-Meier survival analyses were used for gene set validation in independent datasets. We further evaluated these genes for their association with cancer dependency.
The deregulated expression of the PCa-related genes was associated with overall and disease-specific survival, metastasis and/or high recurrence risk, while the CRPC-related genes clearly discriminated between adeno and neuroendocrine phenotypes. Some of the genes showed context-specific essentiality. We further identified candidate drugs through a computational repositioning approach for targeting these genes and treating lethal variants of PCa.
This work provides a proof-of-concept for the use of an integrative approach to identify candidate biomarkers involved in PCa progression and CRPC pathogenesis within the goal of precision medicine.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
