Pan-cancer analysis reveals the prognostic and immunomodulatory potential of super-enhancer-induced ANGPT2 and experimental validation in colorectal cancer.

BACKGROUND

ANGPT2 plays important roles in cancer development. However, there is still no systematic analysis of ANGPT2 in pan-cancer.

METHODS

In this paper, we conducted a pan-cancer analysis to investigate the characteristics of ANGPT2. Furthermore, we investigated the impact of genetic and epigenetic factors on ANGPT2 expression by bioinformatics and assays.

RESULTS

By several TCGA and GEO databases, we identified elevated expression of ANGPT2 in various tumor types. Besides, high expression of ANGPT2 induced poor prognosis of patients in multiple tumors. Through enrichment analysis, we found that ANGPT2 participated in various biological processes, including angiogenesis and immunity. Various immune analyses indicated that high expression of ANGPT2 might suggest a propensity towards a hot tumor microenvironment, but its impact on immunotherapy was negative. Bioinformatics analysis and experiments confirmed that genetic and epigenetic factors explained part of the mechanism behind ANGPT2 abnormal expression. Finally, we screened candidate drugs targeting the ANGPT2 protein by molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulation.

CONCLUSION

ANGPT2 has diagnostic and prognostic values in multiple tumor types. Though with a hot tumor microenvironment, ANGPT2 high expression patients are not suitable for immunotherapy because of its proangiogenic function, contributing to selecting the exact patients for immunotherapy. Both genetic and epigenetic factors influenced ANGPT2 expression, with the influence of super-enhancer being more pronounced. This paper for the first time did the systematic analysis of ANGPT2 and showed its characteristic in pan-cancer. We summarized the biomarker role of ANGPT2 on tumor diagnosis and prognosis, as well as its target role on tumor immunotherapy.