A Pan-Cancer Analysis Suggests an Important Role of TMEM45A in the Immune Response against Stomach Adenocarcinoma

Abstract

Background: TMEM45A is a hypoxia-related gene encoding a transmembrane protein, which plays a role in forming the extracellular matrix. Despite recent data demonstrating the role of TMEM45A in tumor development and prognosis in several cancer types, there is no pan-cancer study of its involvement in tumorigenesis. We assessed the predictive significance and possible participation of TMEM45A for diverse types of human cancers and also evaluated its impact on the immune response against stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD). Methods: We collected data from public big data repositories including cBioPortal, GEPIA2, GSCA, Kaplan–Meier, LinkedOmics, TIMER2, TISCH, and others analyzed them via multiple bioinformatics methods to explore the potential role of TMEM45A as an oncogene. Results: Our results demonstrated higher levels of TMEM45A mRNA expression in 13 cancer types, which was negatively associated with the prognosis of 12 cancer types. We further observed a positive correlation of TMEM45A with the immune, stromal, and ESTIMATE scores in STAD cells and many other tumor types. Conclusions: TMEM45A is expressed in a variety of different types of tumors and may serve as a prognostic marker and may be implicated in new targeted therapy in the future.