Abstract
Currently, the occurrence and mortality rate of cervical cancer is high, particularly in low-to-middle-income countries. Therefore, the development of novel diagnostic and treatment strategies for cervical cancer is urgently required. The aim of the present study was to assess the prognostic significance of fibronectin type III domain containing 3B (FNDC3B) expression in patients with cervical cancer and to determine the underlying mechanism of FNDC3 in tumor development. Analysis of the ONCOMINE database revealed that FNDC3B was significantly upregulated in cervical cancer tissue compared with normal tissue. Additionally, FNDC3B expression data and the clinical characteristics of patients with cervical cancer were obtained from the cBioPortal database. Correlations between FNDC3B expression and overall survival were subsequently investigated. The results revealed that increased FNDC3B expression was significantly correlated with a lower overall survival in patients with cervical cancer. A co-expression network was subsequently constructed to elucidate the function of FNDC3B in cervical cancer. Co-expression genes for FNDC3B were obtained from the cBioPortal database and were subjected to Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analyses. The results demonstrated that the genes were enriched in pathways associated with migration, invasion, endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and the unfolded protein response (UPR). Furthermore, immunofluorescence results obtained from the Human Protein Atlas revealed that the FNDC3B protein was localized to the ER. The results revealed that upregulated FNDC3B expression may be a biomarker for poor prognosis for patients with cervical cancer. Additionally, the results revealed that FNDC3B may serve an oncogenic role in cancer development via ER stress, UPR, cell migration and invasion. However, further studies are required to determine the exact molecular mechanism of FNDC3B in the development of cervical cancer and to assess its potential as a novel therapeutic target for the treatment of this disease.