Systematic analysis of gene expression alterations and clinical outcomes of STAT3 in cancer

// Xiangrong Cui 1, 2, 3, * , Xuan Jing 5, * , Qin Yi 1, 2, 3 , Chunlan Long 1, 2, 3 , Bin Tan 1, 2, 3 , Xin Li 1, 2, 3 , Xueni Chen 1, 2, 3 , Yue Huang 1, 2, 3 , Zhongping Xiang 1, 2, 3 , Jie Tian 4 and Jing Zhu 1, 2, 3 1 Pediatric Research Institute, Children’s Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Child Development and Disorders, Chongqing 400014, China 2 China International Science and Technology Cooperation Base of Child Development and Critical Disorders, Chongqing 400014, China 3 Chongqing Key Laboratory of Pediatrics, Chongqing 400014, China 4 Cardiovascular Department (Internal Medicine), Children’s Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400014, China 5 Clinical laboratory, Shanxi Province people’s hospital, Shanxi 030000, Taiyuan, China * These authors contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Jing Zhu, email: 412232858@qq.com Keywords: STAT3; overall survival; mutation; copy number alteration Received: August 14, 2017      Accepted: November 16, 2017      Published: December 14, 2017 ABSTRACT Accumulated studies have provided controversial evidences of prognostic value for signal transducer and activator of transcription proteins 3 (STAT3) in cancers. To address this inconsistency, we performed a systematic analysis to determine whether STAT3 can serve as a prognostic marker in human cancers. STAT3 expression was assessed using Oncomine analysis. cBioPortal, Kaplan-Meier Plotter, and Prognoscan were performed to identify the prognostic roles of STAT3 in human cancers. The copy number alteration, mutation, interactive analysis, and visualize the altered networks were performed by cBioPortal. We found that STAT3 was more frequently overexpressed in lung, ovarian, gastric, blood and brain cancers than their normal tissues and its expression might be negatively related with the prognosis. In addition, STAT3 mutation mainly occurred in uterine cancer and existed in a hotspot in SH2 domain. Those findings suggest that STAT3 might serve as a diagnostic and therapeutic target for certain types of cancer, such as lung, ovarian, gastric, blood and brain cancers. However, future research is required to validate our findings and thus promote the clinical utility of STAT3 in those cancers prognosis evaluation.