Comprehensive analysis to identify the relationship between CALD1 and immune infiltration in glioma

Background: An accumulating number of studies show that CALD1 is associated with a variety of tumor microenvironments (TME) and is closely related to patients' survival. However, to the best of our knowledge, few studies examined the role of CALD1 in the immune microenvironment of glioma. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential correlation between CALD1 and the pathogenesis and progression of glioma, aiming to identify a novel therapeutic target.

Methods: We assessed the role of CALD1 in pan-cancer and investigated the correlation between CALD1 and TME of glioma by bioinformatic analysis and experimental verification.

Results: We found that CALD1 expression in glioma was associated with a variety of infiltrating immune cells. CALD1 can promote the development of glioma by affecting M2 macrophage infiltration. Also, we found that CALD1 was closely associated with tumor mutation burden, microsatellite instability, copy number variation, methylation, and stem cell index. Our clinical correlation study demonstrated that CALD1 was associated with overall survival, progression-free interval, and disease-specific survival in a variety of tumors. We verified the significantly high expression of CALD1 in glioma using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and Western blotting. Meanwhile, we also conducted relevant cell experiments to prove that CALD1 can affect the proliferation and migration ability of glioma cells in vitro.

Conclusions: Our results confirmed that CALD1 may be a prognostic marker for glioma and a potential target for immunotherapy in the future.