CD52 is a prognostic biomarker and correlated with immune features in breast cancer

Abstract Background: Breast cancer (BRCA) is the most commonly diagnosed cancer of women, which is aggressive cancer and has a mortality rate. CD52 and its monoclonal antibody (Alemtuzumab) play a critical role in inflammatory diseases, but the relationship between CD52 and BRCA is not clear.Methods: We first used the random forest algorithm to find the most critical genes related to the prognosis of BRCA patients. Then, according to the analysis of RNA sequence and clinical data of the TCGA dataset, we explored the relationship between CD52 with immune response-related pathways and immune metagenes. The pan-cancer analysis shows the importance of CD52 in a variety of tumorsResults:CD52 was related to the prognosis of BRCA patients (p < 0.001). Subsequent analysis based on RNA-seq and clinical data from the TCGA dataset revealed that CD52 is positively correlated with immune response-related pathways and immune metagenes. TIMER analysis showed that CD52 expression was positively correlated with immune infiltrating levels of B, CD4+ T, and CD8+ T cells, macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells (DCs) in BRCA (r = 0.466, r = 0.645, r = 0.483, r = 0.149, r= 0.542,r = 0.665, respectively; p < 0.001). CpG sites (cg16068833, cg19743891, cg19743891, cg16664472, cg19677267, cg22517705, and cg27430637) were negatively correlated with CD52 expression (r = -0.662, r = -0.629, r =- 0.598, r = -0.519, r= -0.492, r = -0.445, respectively; p < 0.001). Furthermore, the expression of CD52 was significantly correlated with the following pathological stages (T stage, N stage, and survival state; p=0.024, p=0.047, and p=0.007, respectively). The results of the pan-cancers study suggest that CD52 may play an important role in the occurrence, development, and prognosis of multiple tumors.Conclusions: These findings suggested that CD52 is a promising immunotherapy target and prognostic prediction value for BRCA.