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Updated: Nov 29, 2025
Author Spotlight: Investigating Immune Cell Dynamics in the Tumor Microenvironment — Challenges and Innovations in Cancer Prognosis
Published on: April 12, 2024
AHNAK2 is a novel prognostic marker and correlates with immune infiltration in papillary thyroid cancer: Evidence
Long Zheng1, Shanshan Li2, Xianghong Zheng1
1Department of Nuclear Medicine, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710004, Shaanxi, China.
Abstract:
Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is the most prevalent endocrine tumor, and its incidence is still increasing. The mechanisms of PTC dedifferentiation and malignant progression remain unclear. In this study, we identified AHNAK2 as a key gene in PTC by differential expression analysis among four GEO datasets and validated its overexpression profile by data from the Oncomine, TCGA, and HPA databases and IHC staining analysis. AHNAK2 upregulation significantly correlated with advanced grades, stages, and lymph node events. Survival analysis suggested that AHNAK2 overexpression was coupled with poor overall survival. The immune infiltration analysis by TIMER and CIBERSORT indicated that AHNAK2 expression tightly correlated with the infiltration of diverse immune cell types, especially T cell subtypes. In addition, AHNAK2 is correlated with the expression of other conventional key genes of TC, such as PIK3CA, MAPK1, CTNNB1, and SLC5A5. AHNAK2 may be a novel prognostic marker for PTC.
