High Expression of POGK Predicts Poor Prognosis in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Kruppel-associated box (KRAB) proteins reportedly play a dual role in neoplastic transformation. At present, little is known about the function of the proteins encoded by the human pogo transposable element derived with KRAB domain (POGK) gene. Herein, we evaluated the prognostic significance of POGK expression in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

The data of HCC patients was downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. To determine the relationship between POGK and clinical features, logistic regression was applied. Cox regression and Kaplan-Meier analyses were used to evaluate the correlation between POGK and survival rates. Gene ontology (GO) analysis and Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) were conducted to identify the enriched pathways and functions associated with POGK.

A total of 374 HCC patients were identified in TCGA. POGK was significantly upregulated in HCC and correlated with tumor status (p = 0.036), race (p = 0.025), weight (p = 0.002), body mass index (p = 0.033), histologic grade (p < 0.001), and alpha-fetoprotein (p < 0.001). High POGK expression in HCC patients correlated with a poor outcome in terms of overall survival (p = 0.0018), progression-free survival (p = 0.0087), relapse-free survival (p = 0.045), and disease-specific survival (p = 0.014), according to Kaplan-Meier analysis. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed that the area under the curve of POGK expression for HCC diagnosis was 0.891. GSEA showed that high POGK expression might activate mitotic prometaphase, kinesins, homologous DNA pairing and strand exchange, MET activates PTK2 signaling pathway, G1 to S cell cycle control, Aurora B pathway, ncRNAs involved in WNT signaling pathway, hepatitis C, and ncRNAs involved in the STAT3 signaling pathway. POGK expression correlated with the abundance of adaptive and innate immunocytes in HCC.

High expression of POGK has high diagnostic and prognostic values in patients with HCC. Moreover, POGK expression is correlated with immune infiltration in HCC.