High Expression of THY1 in Intestinal Gastric Cancer as a Key Factor in Tumor Biology: A Poor Prognosis-Independent Marker Related to the Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition Profile.

Gastric cancer (GC) is an important cancer-related death worldwide. Among its histological subtypes, intestinal gastric cancer (IGC) is the most common. A previous work showed that increased expression of the gene was associated with poor overall survival in IGC. Furthermore, it was shown that IGC tumor cells with high expression of have a greater capacity for tumorigenesis and metastasis in vitro. This study aimed to identify molecular differences between IGC with high and low expression of . Using a feature selection method, a group of 35 genes were found to be the most informative gene set for IGC tumors. Through a classification model, these genes differentiate from tumors with 100% of accuracy both in the test subset and the independent test set. Additionally, this group of 35 genes correctly clustered 100% of the samples. An extensive validation of this potential molecular signature in multiple cohorts successfully segregated between and IGC tumors (>95%), proving to be independent of the gene expression quantification methodology. These genes are involved in central processes to tumor biology, such as the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and remodeling of the tumor tissue composition. Moreover, patients with IGC demonstrated poor survival and a more advanced clinicopathological staging. Our findings revealed a molecular signature for IGC with high expression. This signature showed EMT and remodeling of the tumor tissue composition potentially related to the biology of IGC. Altogether, our results indicate that IGC tumors are a particular subset of tumors with a specific molecular and prognosis profile.