Ferritin light chain as a potential biomarker for the prognosis of liver hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract

High expression of the ferritin light chain (FTL) in cancer promotes its onset and progression and is associated with tumour evolution. However, the significance of FTL in pan-cancer progression and prognosis in humans remains unclear. Therefore, we selected various bioinformatics databases to perform a pan-cancer analysis on a public dataset. Our results showed that FTL was differentially expressed in pan-cancer tissues compared to normal tissues. High FTL expression significantly correlated with the clinicopathological characteristics of patients with liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC). The subsequent validation experiments confirmed these observations. Notably, our study found for the first time that FTLs are closely associated with LIHC and that FTLs have important clinical diagnostic and prognostic value for patients with LIHC. We confirmed that FTL expression was closely associated with altered DNA cycles and immune infiltration in LIHC. In conclusion, high levels of FTL expression are associated with poor prognosis in LIHC patients and are expected to be a potential prognostic and immune marker for LIHC.

Keywords

• FTL
• Pan-cancer
• Liver hepatocellular carcinoma
• TME
• Immune infiltration
• Biomarker