Systematic analysis of the aberrances and functional implications of cuproptosis in cancer

Cuproptosis is a novel form of cell death driven by a copper-dependent proteotoxic stress response whose comprehensive landscape in tumors remains unclear. Here, we comprehensively characterized cuproptosis-related genes (CRGs) across 33 cancers using multi-omic data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), showing complicated and diverse results in different cancers. We also explored the relationships between CRGs and cancer metabolic patterns, pathway activity, and tumor microenvironment (TME), suggesting that they played critical roles in tumor progression and TME cell infiltration. We further established the cuproptosis potential index (CPI) to reveal the functional roles of cuproptosis, and characterized multi-omic molecular features associated with cuproptosis. In clinical applications, we performed a combined analysis of the sensitivity of CRGs and CPI to drug response and immunotherapy. This study provides a rich resource for understanding cuproptosis, offering a broad molecular perspective for future functional and therapeutic studies of multiple cancer pathways mediated by cuproptosis.