Phosphoserine phosphatase as an indicator for survival through potentially influencing the infiltration levels of immune cells in neuroblastoma

作者：Liang Zeng, Xiaoyun Liu, Kai Chen, Liang-Jun Qin, Fenghua Wang, Lei Miao, Le Li, Haiyun Wang · 发表于：Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.3389/fcell.2022.873710 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Neuroblastoma Research and Treatments、Cancer, Hypoxia, and Metabolism、Immune cells in cancer

Introduction: Metabolic deregulation, a hallmark of cancer, fuels cancer cell growth and metastasis. Phosphoserine phosphatase (PSPH), an enzyme of the serine metabolism pathway, has been shown to affect patients’ prognosis in many cancers but its significance in neuroblastoma remains unknown. Here, we show that the functional role and potential mechanism of PSPH and it is correlated with survival of neuroblastoma patients. Patients and Methods: The TARGET dataset (n = 151) and our hospital-based cases (n = 55) were used for assessing the expression level of PSPH associated with survival in neuroblastoma patients, respectively. Then, in vitro experiments were performed to define the role of PSPH in neuroblastoma. The ESTIMATE and TIMER algorithms were utilized to examine the correlation between PSPH expression level and abundance of immune cells. Further, Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was performed to evaluate the effect of both PSPH and immune cells on patients’ prognosis. Results: High expression of PSPH was significantly associated with unfavorable overall survival (OS) and event-free survival (EFS) in both the TARGET dataset and our hospital-based cases, and was an independent predictor of OS (hazard ratio, 2.00; 95% confidence intervals, 1.21–3.30, p = 0.0067). In vitro experiments showed that high expression of PSPH significantly promoted cell growth and metastasis. Further, the ESTIMATE result suggested that high expression level of PSPH was negatively associated with...