Background: As one of the most common malignant tumors of the digestive tract, esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is an advanced metastatic cancer with an extremely high mortality rate and the highest prevalence rate in China. Spindle- and kinetochore-associated protein 1 (SKA1), an essential member involved in chromosome separation during mitosis, has been indicated as a potential biomarker in the pathogenesis and development of various types of malignant tumors; however, the exact functions of SKA1 in ESCC are still unclear.
Patients and methods: SKA1 expression was explored in stage IIA ESCC and corresponding healthy esophageal mucosa tissues through immunohistochemistry and reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction and was further validated using The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database of the online tool UALCAN. Then, the clinicopathological correlations of SKA1 were analyzed based on the follow-up data. Furthermore, using the online tool LinkedOmics, the correlation test, gene ontology (GO), and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway enrichment analysis of SKA1 were analyzed using high-throughput sequencing data of ESCC patients from TCGA dataset.
Results: The expression level of SKA1 was markedly upregulated in ESCC tissues. Upregulation of SKA1 significantly correlated with higher pathological T stage (P = 0.003) and poorer overall survival (P = 0.013). GO and pathway enrichment analyses of SKA1 in ESCC revealed that SKA1 was involved in a number of classical cell cycle-related pathways that contribute to special biological processes in tumorigenesis and development of ESCC.
Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrate that SKA1 may act as a prognostic biomarker for stage IIA ESCC. Combined with the bioinformatic analysis, SKA1 could potentially serve as a therapeutic target for ESCC.
Conclusion: The results coming from the present study demonstrated that SKA1 may act as a prognostic biomarker for stage IIA ESCC. Combined with the bioinformatic analysis, SKA1 could serve as a potential therapeutic target for ESCC.
Keywords: Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma; UALCAN; prognosis; recurrence.