UPREGULATION OF ASAP2 IS ASSOCIATED WITH POOR PROGNOSIS AND IMMUNE INFILTRATION IN PANCREATIC CANCER

Lin Ma¹, Chuan Lan², Dawei Deng², Sheng Liu¹, Haoyou Tang¹, Shu Yan², Xiaobin Huang¹, Jianshui Li^2*

¹Institute of Hepatobiliary, Pancreatic and Intestinal Disease, 10 North Sichuan Medical College, Nanchong, Sichuan, China - ²Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery II, Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College, Nanchong, Sichuan, China

Introduction: The objective of this study was to explore the expression, clinical significance, cellular function, and relevance to tumour immunity of Arf-Gap with sh3 domain, ankyrin repeat, and PH domain 2 (ASAP2) in pancreatic cancer.

Materials and methods: Transcriptional data for the ASAP2 gene were retrieved from multiple databases, and clinical samples were collected to analyze the expression of ASAP2 and its prognostic significance. The potential cellular functions of ASAP2 were analyzed using protein-protein interactions (PPI), GO, and KEGG functions and validated using cellular function assays. The relevance of ASAP2 to tumour immunity was analysed using the ssGSEA method.

Results: ASAP2 is shown to be at high levels of expression in PC tissues and cells and is implicated in a poor prognosis of patients. Functional and pathway analysis demonstrated that ASAP2 was likely to regulate cell functional organization, Ras protein signaling and PI3K-AKT signaling pathways. ASAP2 knockdown suppresses the proliferation, apoptosis, migration, invasive ability, and PI3K-AKT signaling pathway of pancreatic cancer cells. Besides, ASAP2 was adversely related to the abundance of infiltrating plasma cells (pDCs), CD8 T cells, Tfh cells, and cytotoxic cells in PC tissue and positively correlated with Th2 cells.

Conclusions: According to our data, ASAP2 appears to be a biomarker that measures prognosis and tumor immune infiltration in pancreatic cancer patients and might be a therapeutic target for pancreatic cancer treatment.