Glycolysis-Related SLC2A1 Is a Potential Pan-Cancer Biomarker for Prognosis and Immunotherapy

Abstract

SLC2A1 plays a pivotal role in cancer glycometabolism. SLC2A1 has been proposed as a putative driver gene in various cancers. However, a pan-cancer analysis of SLC2A1 has not yet been performed. In this study, we explored the expression and prognosis of SLC2A1 in pan-cancer across multiple databases. We conducted genetic alteration, epigenetic, and functional enrichment analyses of SLC2A. We calculated the correlation between SLC2A1 and tumor microenvironment using the TCGA pan-cancer dataset. We observed high expression levels of SLC2A1 with poor prognosis in most cancers. The overall genetic alteration frequency of SLC2A1 was 1.8% in pan-cancer, and the SLC2A1 promoter was hypomethylation in several cancers. Most m6A-methylation-related genes positively correlated with the expression of SLC2A1 in 33 TCGA cancers. Moreover, SLC2A1 was mainly related to the functions including epithelial–mesenchymal transition, glycolysis, hypoxia, cell-cycle regulation, and DNA repair. Finally, SLC2A1 positively associated with neutrophils and cancer-associated fibroblasts in the tumor microenvironment of most cancers and significantly correlated with TMB and MSI in various cancers. Notably, SLC2A1 was remarkably positively correlated with PD-L1 and CTLA4 in most cancers. SLC2A1 might serve as an attractive pan-cancer biomarker for providing new insights into cancer therapeutics.