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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 4|pp 5263—5283

Value of KPNA4 as a diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for hepatocellular carcinoma

Mingxing Xu1, Hao Liang2, Kun Li3, Shu Zhu4, Zhicheng Yao2, Ruiyun Xu1, Nan Lin1
  • 1Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510630, Guangdong, China
  • 2Department of General Surgery, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510630, Guangdong, China
  • 3Department of Liver Transplantation, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510630, Guangdong, China
  • 4Department of Infectious Diseases, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510630, Guangdong, China
* Equal contribution
Received: January 9, 2020Accepted: November 25, 2020Published: February 1, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202447

Copyright: © 2021 Xu 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

It is important to identify novel biomarkers to improve hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) diagnosis and treatment. Herein, we reported the role of karyopherin α4 (KPNA4) in HCC patients through public data mining and examined the results using clinical samples in our center. Our results revealed that KPNA4 expression level was positively correlated with the infiltration of CD8+ T cells, B cells, dendritic cells, CD4+ T cells, neutrophils and macrophages. In addition, KPNA4 expression was significantly associated with T cell exhaustion. KPNA4 mRNA and protein expression levels were significantly higher in cancerous tissue than in normal tissue. Besides, the increased expression of KPNA4 indicated poor overall survival. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses showed KPNA4 could be viewed as an independent risk factor for HCC patients. Moreover, our experimental results were consistent with those obtained from bioinformatic results. These findings revealed KPNA4 may serve as a novel prognostic biomarker and a potential therapeutic target for HCC.