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Role of interferon-induced transmembrane protein family in cancer progression: a special focus on pancreatic cancer

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Abstract

Human interferon-induced transmembrane protein family (IFITMs) consists of five main proteins. IFITM1, IFITM2, and IFITM3 can be induced by interferon, while IFITM5 and IFITM10 are insensitive to interferon. IFITMs has various functions, including well-researched antiviral effects. As a molecule whose expression is significantly increased by interferon in the immune microenvironment, IFITMs has drawn growing interest in recent years for their role in the cancer progression. Unlike antiviral effects, the role and mechanism of IFITMs in cancer progression have not been clearly studied, especially the role and molecular mechanism of IFITMs in pancreatic cancer are rarely reported in the literature. This article focuses on the role and potential mechanism of IFITMs in pancreatic cancer progression by analyzing the function and mechanism of IFITM1-3 in other cancers and conducting bioinformatics analysis using the databases, so as to provide a new target for pancreatic cancer therapy.

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Data availability

All data of this article can be found from UCSC Xena (https://xenabrowser.net/), TCGA database (https://tcga-data.nci.nih.gov/tcga/), and GTEx databases (http://commonfund.nih.gov/GTEx/). The unpaired t test and one-way ANOVA were used to analyze the expression levels of IFITMs in tumor and normal tissues and the relationship with pathologic characteristics by GraphPad Prism 9.5 or R packages ggplot2 and ggpubr. The survival probability was determined using Kaplan–Meier survival curves by log-rank test and cox regression analysis by R packages survival and survminer. The CIBERSORT deconvolution algorithm was introduced to analyze the relative abundance of infiltrating immune cells from the gene expression data of PAAD in TCGA datasets by R package CIBERSORT. All statistical tests were two-sided. The p < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Figures 2, 3, and 5 are plotted by online software Biorender (https://app.biorender.com).

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Acknowledgements

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Funding

This work was funded by Sichuan University Dedicated Postdoctoral Research and Development Fund Project (2022SCU12030).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Immunology, West China School of Basic Medical Sciences and Forensic Medicine, Sichuan University, 3-17 Renmin South Rd, Chengdu, 610041, Sichuan, China

    Peipei Wang, Yan Pan, Yu Zhang, Congliang Chen, Junmei Hu & Xia Wang

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  1. Peipei Wang
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  2. Yan Pan
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  3. Yu Zhang
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Contributions

Peipei Wang participated in the Conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, resources, software, investigation, formal analysis, and writing of the original draft; Yan Pan participated in the Data curation and writing of the original draft; Yu Zhang participated in the Software, visualization, and investigation; Congliang Chen participated in the Software, resources, and validation; Junmei Hu participated in the Resources and writing, reviewing, and editing of the manuscript; Xia Wang (Corresponding Author) participated in the Conceptualization, resources, supervision, and writing, reviewing, and editing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xia Wang.

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Wang, P., Pan, Y., Zhang, Y. et al. Role of interferon-induced transmembrane protein family in cancer progression: a special focus on pancreatic cancer. Med Oncol 41, 85 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12032-024-02308-6

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