Construction of a risk map to understand the vulnerability of various types of cancer patients to COVID‐19 infection

Abstract

Abstract COVID‐19 is leading to a global pandemic and invades human cells via ACE2. ACE2 was found to be abundantly expressed in many organs and cells. However, there is no evidence about the potential risk of various types of cancer patients vulnerable to the infection of COVID‐19. To obtain a risk map that indicates the novel coronavirus vulnerability of different types of cancer, we analyzed in this work the RNA sequencing datasets of cancer patients. By interrogating the datasets, we not only identified the cancer types vulnerable to COVID‐19 attacks, but also we reported that variations in the mRNA expression level of ACE2 correlate to various prognosis phenomenon in different types of cancer cohorts, and illustrated the underlying mechanism involved or may be related to lymphocytes infiltration. From these discoveries, we constructed an infection risk map, which indicates the vulnerability of different types of cancer to COVID‐19 infection, also elucidated the correlationship between ACE2 and the prognosis of cancer. We found that high ACE2 expression levels lead to high risk of COVID‐19 infection and poor prognosis of breast invasive carcinoma (BRCA), while better prognosis in ovarian serous cystadenocarcinoma (OV) patient cohorts. Moreover, our study demonstrated that this different pattern may correlate with the immune infiltration level.

Keywords

• ACE2
• cancer
• COVID‐19
• prognosis
• tumor‐infiltrating lymphocytes