Overexpressed gene signature of EPH receptor A/B family in cancer patients-comprehensive analyses from the public high-throughput database

Nam Nhut Phan; Shirui Liu; Chih-Yang Wang; Hui-Ping Hsu; Ming-Derg Lai; Chung-Yen Li; Chien-Fu Chen; Chung-Chieh Chiao; Meng-Chi Yen; Zhengda Sun; Jia-Zhen Jiang

Overexpressed gene signature of EPH receptor A/B family in cancer patients-comprehensive analyses from the public high-throughput database

Int J Clin Exp Pathol. 2020 May 1;13(5):1220-1242. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Nam Nhut Phan¹, Shirui Liu^{2

3}, Chih-Yang Wang^{4

5

6}, Hui-Ping Hsu⁷, Ming-Derg Lai⁴, Chung-Yen Li⁴, Chien-Fu Chen⁸, Chung-Chieh Chiao⁸, Meng-Chi Yen⁹, Zhengda Sun¹⁰, Jia-Zhen Jiang¹¹

Affiliations

¹ NTT Institute of Hi-Technology, Nguyen Tat Thanh University Ho Chi Minh City 700000, Vietnam.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.
³ Department of Mechanical Design Manufacturing and Automation, College of Mechanical Engineering, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology Shanxi 030024, People's Republic of China.
⁴ Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University Tainan 11031, Taiwan.
⁵ PhD Program for Cancer Molecular Biology and Drug Discovery, College of Medical Science and Technology, Taipei Medical University Taipei 11031, Taiwan.
⁶ Graduate Institute of Cancer Biology and Drug Discovery, College of Medical Science and Technology, Taipei Medical University Taipei 11031, Taiwan.
⁷ Department of Surgery, National Cheng Kung University Hospital, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University Tainan 704, Taiwan.
⁸ School of Chinese Medicine for Post-Baccalaureate, I-Shou University Kaohsiung 84001, Taiwan.
⁹ Department of Emergency Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung Medical University Kaohsiung 80708, Taiwan.
¹⁰ Department of Radiology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.
¹¹ Emergency Department, Huashan Hospital North, Fudan University Shanghai 201508, People's Republic of China.

PMID: 32509099
PMCID: PMC7270671

Abstract

Although a previous study suggested that erythropoietin-producing hepatoma (EPH) receptors play important roles in tumor progression and the overexpression of EPHs in cancer patients is related to poor prognoses, high-throughput gene expression profiling of EPH family members in different types and subtypes of cancers has so far not been conducted. We herein carried out a series of bioinformatic analyses on expressive profiles of every EPH member across 21 different types of clinical cancers versus matched normal tissues gathered from the Oncomine platform. We validated these results by protein expression study of all EPHs family members by The Human Protein Atlas repository. Our results uncovered the overexpression of most EPH subunits in numerous cancer types, especially the dramatic overexpression of six EPHs members, namely EPHA1, EPHA2, EPHA3, EPHA4 and EPHB1, EPHB2, EPHB3, EPHB4 in bladder, colorectal, esophageal, gastric, and prostate cancers. Furthermore, EPHB2 was specifically highly expressed in cervical cancer, EPHA3 in liver cancer, and EPHB1 in uterine cancer. Collectively, expressive profiles of these EPHs were confirmed and correlated with different cancer subtypes as potential biomarkers. This study provides useful information for further studies on cancer development and clinical treatments.

Keywords: Erythropoietin-producing hepatoma (EPH) receptors; bioinformatics; ephrins; erythropoietin-producing hepatocellular type-A (EPHA) receptor; erythropoietin-producing hepatocellular type-B (EPHB) receptor; medical oncology.