ITPRIPL1: A tumor immune-associated biomarker with prognostic and therapeutic implications in gastrointestinal cancer

Inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor-interacting protein-like 1(ITPRIPL1) has recently been implicated in tumor-immune regulation, yet its tumor-type specificity and clinical relevance in gastrointestinal malignancies remain unclear. Here, we performed an integrative analysis of ITPRIPL1 across stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD), colon adenocarcinoma (COAD), rectal adenocarcinoma (READ), and esophageal carcinoma (ESCA) using bulk transcriptomics, immune pathway analyses, survival modeling, single-cell RNA sequencing, immunofluorescence validation, and therapeutic correlation analyses. Although ITPRIPL1 was upregulated across gastrointestinal cancers, its prognostic significance was highly tumor-specific, with elevated expression consistently predicting unfavorable survival only in STAD. In gastric cancer, ITPRIPL1 expression was closely associated with immune-related pathways and genomic instability features, and its prognostic association varied across immune contexts, particularly according to CD8⁺/CD4⁺ T-cell abundance, with an exploratory association also observed for zeta-chain-associated protein kinase 70 (ZAP70) expression. Single-cell and immunofluorescence analyses demonstrated preferential enrichment of ITPRIPL1 in T cells and tumor-adjacent immune structures. Notably, Exploratory analyses further showed that higher ITPRIPL1 expression was associated with favorable survival outcomes in selected external pretreatment immunotherapy cohorts and with lower IC50 values for several agents in cancer cell-line pharmacogenomic datasets. Collectively, these findings identify ITPRIPL1 as an immune-associated biomarker with primary clinical relevance in gastric cancer.