Published online Feb 15, 2024. doi: 10.4251/wjgo.v16.i2.436
Peer-review started: August 19, 2023
First decision: December 5, 2023
Revised: December 13, 2023
Accepted: January 9, 2024
Article in press: January 9, 2024
Published online: February 15, 2024
Processing time: 166 Days and 17.8 Hours
A growing number of clinical examples suggest that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) appears to have an impact on the treatment of patients with liver cancer compared to the normal population, and the prevalence of COVID-19 is significantly higher in patients with liver cancer. However, this mechanism of action has not been clarified.
To investigate the disease relevance of COVID-19 in liver cancer.
Gene sets for COVID-19 (GSE180226) and liver cancer (GSE87630) were obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus database. After identifying the common differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of COVID-19 and liver cancer, functional enrichment analysis, protein-protein interaction network construction and scree
Of 518 common DEGs were obtained by screening for functional analysis. Fifteen hub genes including aurora kinase B, cyclin B2, cell division cycle 20, cell division cycle associated 8, nucleolar and spindle associated protein 1, etc., were further identified from DEGs using the “cytoHubba” plugin. Functional enrichment analysis of hub genes showed that these hub genes are associated with P53 signalling pathway regulation, cell cycle and other functions, and they may serve as potential molecular markers for COVID-19 and liver cancer. Finally, we selected 10 of the hub genes for in vitro expression validation in liver cancer cells.
Our study reveals a common pathogenesis of liver cancer and COVID-19. These common pathways and key genes may provide new ideas for further mechanistic studies.
Core Tip: In this study, bioinformatics analysis was used as a bridge to correlate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with liver cancer to explore the correlation and common molecular mechanisms between the two. This study explored the common differentially expressed genes between COVID-19 and liver cancer, from which key hub genes were identified and analyzed for protein-protein interaction network topology as well as Gene Ontology functional annotation and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway enrichment. The expression of some of the hub genes in different liver cancer cells was specifically verified by quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction. Our study suggests that the pathogenic association and regulatory mechanism of COVID-19 with liver cancer may be due to the role of specific hub genes, such as PDZ binding kinase, targeting protein for xklp2, aurora kinase B, etc. and the mediation of P53 signaling pathway.