The Potential of TRPA1 as a Therapeutic Target in Cancer-A Study Using Bioinformatic Tools

Background: The expression of the transient receptor potential 1 (TRPA1) gene is increased in many solid tumours, and its function relates to inflammation, oxidative stress or the presence of toxic substances. However, little is known about the correlation of clinical parameters with patients' cancer stages, metastases and the degree of tumour infiltration by immune cells. Methods: We performed a bioinformatic analysis, using databases and public resources to investigate TRPA1 for many available samples. We used samples from the TCGA project and quantified the mRNA expression and survival analysis using TIMER, TIMER.2 and GEPIA. To analyse hypermethylation, a more extensive database was available from the UALCAN website. Results: We show that the TRPA1 gene is hypermethylated in many cancers. The high expression of TRPA1 is correlated with a better prognosis for several cancer types and correlates with cancer stage and metastasis, while in others the TRPA1 is pro-oncogenic. We also report the effect of TRPA1 expression in immune infiltrating cells. Moreover, the expression is linked to genes essential for inflammation, oxidative stress and cellular motility processes. Conclusions: Our study brings new insights into the regulation of TRPA1 expression in different tumours based on analysis provided by public databases, opening the possibility to further investigate the protein as a putative target for cancer.