The landscape and clinical relevance of intronic polyadenylation in human cancers

Intronic polyadenylation (IPA) is an RNA 30 end processing event which has been reported to play important roles in cancer development. However, the comprehensive landscape of IPA events across various cancer types is lacking. Here, we apply IPAFinder to identify and quantify IPA events in 10,383 samples covering all 33 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. We identify a total of 21,835 IPA events, almost half of which are ubiquitously expressed. We identify 2761 unique dynamically changed IPA events across cancer types. Furthermore, we observe 8855 non-redundant clinically relevant IPA events, which could potentially be used as prognostic indicators. Our analysis also reveals that dynamic IPA usage within cancer signaling pathways may affect drug response. Finally, we develop a user-friendly data portal, IPACancer Atlas (http://www.tingni-lab.com/Pancan_IPA/), to search and explore IPAs in cancer. Copyright (c) 2024, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Genetics Society of China. Published by Elsevier Limited and Science Press. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.