Bioinformatic screening and experimental analysis identify SFRP1 as a prognostic biomarker for tongue squamous cell carcinomas

Objective: To provide a prognostic biomarker and a potential therapeutic target for tongue squamous cell carcinoma (TSCC). Design: Screening the prognostic genes of TSCC by bioinformatics, and verifying the correlation between the above genes and the prognosis of TSCC by experiments. Results: Twenty-four common differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between TSCC and the corresponding normal tissues were screened from four sets of TSCC functional gene expression series in Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) datasets. Further bioinformatics research based on the data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) indicate that the low expression of SFRP1 might be correlated with poor prognosis of TSCC patients. By colony formation assay, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), western blotting, immunohistochemical staining, flowcytomerry, lentivirus transfection and animal experiments, it was confirmed that the low level of SFRP1 expression correlated with poor prognosis of TSCC patients. Conclusion: This study identified SFRP1 as a novel prognostic biomarker and a potential therapeutic target for TSCC.