Open Access

ARTICLE

Investigation of the feasibility of NRAV as a biomarker for hepatocellular carcinoma

by JUN LIU^1,2,3,#, WENLI LI³, RUYUE LU^1,2, JIAQING XU^1,2, CHUNHUI JIANG⁴, JUNLIN DUAN³, LINGZHI ZHANG^1,#,*, GUANFU WANG¹, JIAXI CHEN^1,2,#,*

1 Department of Clinical Laboratory, Taizhou Hospital of Zhejiang Province Affiliated to Wenzhou Medical University, Linhai, China
2 Key Laboratory of System Medicine and Precision Diagnosis and Treatment of Taizhou, Taizhou, China
3 Department of Clinical Laboratory, Dongguan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Dongguan, China
4 School of Basic Medical Sciences Forensic Medicine, Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, China

* Corresponding Authors: LINGZHI ZHANG. Email: ; JIAXI CHEN. Email:
# The aforementioned authors made an equal contribution to this study

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Multi-Omics Approaches for Precision Medicine)

Oncology Research 2024, 32(4), 717-726. https://doi.org/10.32604/or.2023.043575

Received 06 July 2023; Accepted 23 October 2023; Issue published 20 March 2024

Abstract

The long non-coding RNA, Negative Regulator of Antiviral Response (NRAV) has been identified as a participant in both respiratory virus replication and immune checkpoints, however, its involvement in pan-cancer immune regulation and prognosis, particularly those of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), remains unclear. To address this knowledge gap, we analyzed expression profiles obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, comparing normal and malignant tumor tissues. We found that NRAV expression is significantly upregulated in tumor tissues compared to adjacent nontumor tissues. Kaplan-Meier (K-M) analysis revealed the prognostic power of NRAV, wherein overexpression was significantly linked to reduced overall survival in a diverse range of tumor patients. Furthermore, noteworthy associations were observed between NRAV, immune checkpoints, immune cell infiltration, genes related to autophagy, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), pyroptosis, tumor mutational burden (TMB), and microsatellite instability (MSI) across different cancer types, including HCC. Moreover, NRAV upregulation expression was associated with multiple pathological stages by clinical observations. Furthermore, our investigation revealed a substantial elevation in the expression of NRAV in both HCC tumor tissues and cells compared to normal tissues and cells. The inhibition of NRAV resulted in the inhibition of cell proliferation, migration, and invasion in HCC cells, while also influencing the expression of CD274 (PD-L1) and CD44, along with various biomarkers associated with EMT, autophagy, and pyroptosis. The aforementioned results propose NRAV as a promising prognostic biomarker for HCC.

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Keywords

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Supplementary Material

Supplementary Material File

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