Angiogenesis is associated with an attenuated tumor microenvironment, aggressive biology, and worse survival in gastric cancer patients

xlomafota13 shared this article with you from Inoreader Angiogenesis is associated with an attenuated tumor microenvironment, aggressive biology, and worse survival in gastric cancer patients Via American Journal of Cancer Research Am J Cancer Res. 2021 Apr 15;11(4):1659-1671. eCollection 2021. ABSTRACT Angiogenesis is a cornerstone of cancer as it allows tumors to receive oxygen and nutrients. A high level of angiogenesis within a tumor may therefore be indicative of its aggressiveness. In this study, we examined this hypothesis in gastric cancer. Gene set variation analysis was used to measure the level of angiogenesis in tumors in 1,348 gastric cancer patients using the Hallmark_angiogenesis gene set to score tumor transcriptomes. As we predicted, there was a significant correlation between angiogenesis score and expression of angiogenesis-related genes. The score moderately correlated with abundance of vessel-related stromal cells, fibroblasts and chondrocytes in the tumor microenvironment (TME). Tumors with high score had low infiltration of T helper type 1 and 2 cells but a greater infiltration of M1 macrophages and dendritic cells. They also had enriched e xpression of gene sets for coagulation, hypoxia, epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT), and TGF-β signaling. High angiogenesis score was significantly associated with advanced AJCC stage and higher T- but not N-parameters in the TNM staging system. Patients with a high score also had shorter survival. In conclusion, bulk tumor transcriptome-based quantification of tumor angiogenesis using a computational algorithm may serve to identify patients with worse survival in gastric cancer. PMID:33948380 | PMC:PMC8085878 View on the web Inoreader. Take back control of your news feed. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.