Abstract
BACKGROUND: The high-mobility group A1 gene (HMGA1) plays a major role in the development of malignant cancers. However, the mechanisms underlying the correlation between HMGA1 expression level and patients' overall survival rate in various malignant cancers is unclear. METHODS: We used The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database (https://genome-cancer.ucsc.edu/) to search for mRNA expression levels of HMGA1 in tumor patients and grouped them by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. This divided patients into a high expression cohort and low expression cohort, and Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed the overall survival of the cancer patients. We also used real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) to detect the expression of HMGA1, CBX7, E-cadherin, and β-catenin gene was detected by normalized to the expression of β-actin in colorectal cancer cell lines. RESULTS: High expression group correlated with worse survival prognosis statistically significant (P<0.05), and scatter plots showed HMGA1 high expression in the different cancers (lung cancers; lung adenocarcinoma and lung squamous cell carcinoma; stomach and colorectal cancers; liver and pancreatic cancer; kidney papillary cell carcinoma; kidney clear cell carcinoma, brain lower grade glioma; adrenocortical cancer; acute myeloid leukemia; and sarcoma; head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, cholangio and bladder urothelial cancers). Further, we also found that the mRNA expressions of HMGA1, CBX7, E-cadherin, and β-catenin genes significantly in colorectal cancer cell lines (P value: 0.0005), consistent with the results of HMGA1 in TCGA database. CONCLUSIONS: HMGA1 is highly expressed in various cancers than normal tissues, and high expression levels of HMGA1 correlated with a worse prognosis. The gene expressions and the TCGA data clearly supports that targeting HMGA1 in the management of cancers increases the survival rate of cancer patients.