P3H4 Overexpression Serves as a Prognostic Factor in Lung Adenocarcinoma

The present study is aimed at evaluating the functional and clinical values of P3H4 in lung adenocarcinoma. Moreover, we also investigated the downstream pathways that P3H4 might participate in.

The differential expression analysis was used to identify genes differentially expressed in lung adenocarcinoma tissues as compared with normal tissues. Survival analysis was used to test the association between P3H4 and survival time. Gene set enrichment analysis was conducted to explore the downstream pathways. CCK8 and transwell were employed to examine the impact of P3H4 on cell phenotypes.

P3H4 was highly upregulated in LUAD tissues at both RNA and protein levels. Moreover, the LUAD patients, who had high expression of P3H4, were also observed to have shorter disease-free survival and overall survival. These results demonstrated that P3H4 could be used as a prognostic biomarker for LUAD. Moreover, we also found that it was the copy number alterations (CNAs), not DNA methylation, that regulated the RNA expression of P3H4, indicating that its upregulation might be partially resulted from the CNAs. Furthermore, functional experiments revealed that the A549 and H1299 cells with siRNA treatment (siP3H4) exhibited significantly decreased cell proliferation after 24 hours, migratory ability, and invasiveness. Functionally, the upregulated proteins in the P3H4 high expression group were mainly enriched in tumor microenvironment-related pathways such as phagosome, focal adhesion, and ECM-receptor interaction and cancer-related pathways such as bladder cancer pathway, proteoglycans in cancer, and hippo signaling pathway.

The present study systematically evaluated the functional and clinical values of P3H4 in LUAD, and explored the related biological pathways. P3H4 might promote LUAD progression through regulating tumor microenvironment-related pathways.