Endometrial carcinoma ranks seventh among all cancers globally, with its incidence and mortality rates increasing. Moreover, endometrial carcinoma is an important cause of death from gynecology diseases, after breast cancer (Ullah MF, 2019), colon carcinoma, and carcinoma of the lungs in women (Mao YS et al., 2016; Schayek H et al., 2017). Endometrial carcinoma can be splited into type I or type II according to histopathology and clinical presentation (McAlpine J et al., 2018; Lee YC et al., 2017; Zaidi A et al., 2020). Type I endometrial cancer are most general in pre- and peri-menopausal women, accounting for 80 to 90 percent of endometrial cancer cases and consisting of endometrial or mucinous adenocarcinoma (Murali R et al., 2014). In the era of precision medicine, constant researches for screening, diagnosis, pathologic assessment and overall survival of biomarkers have become integral to the management of women with endometrial carcinoma (Berger AA et al., 2021; Chang Z et al., 2019; Vermij L et al., 2020). However, there has not been a significant clinical improvement in endometrial carcinoma biomarkers for surveillance, early diagnosis, prognosis and treatment response purposes. Therefore, researching on new biomarkers for the diagnosis of the occurrence, progression, and recrudescence of endometrial carcinoma is of great importance.
Keratin (KRT) is abundant in the external stratums of human skin and is a family of proteins essential for hair constitution(Agarwal V et al., 2019). According to the protein order, Keratin is ulteriorly classified as 2 types: type I keratin and type II keratin (Ujiie D et al., 2020). Studies demonstrated that the expression of KRT14 in some foundational cell of bladder is high, and contributes to the progress of transitional cell carcinoma (Babu S et al., 2021). KRT19 is also highly expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma and induces a more pugnacious tumor phenotype (Zhang XD et al., 2021; Tang J et al., 2014; Atta IS, 2021). Moreover, upregulation of KRT8 can facilitate tumor transfer of clear cell renal carcinoma (Tan HS et al., 2017; Szponar A et al., 2012; Maertens Y et al., 2017). KRT17 is a type I keratin that was first cited as facilitating epithelium propagation and skin tumor development when it was first discovered (Xun Y et al., 2021). Recently, more and more high levels of aberrant expression of KRT17 have been discovered, its clinical value is disclosed in various kinds of cancers, including in epithelial ovarian cancer(Yang LT et al., 2019), endocervical glandular cancer (Regenbogen E et al., 2018), squamous cell carcinoma of the uterine cervix (Mockler D et al., 2017), triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) (Franceschi T et al., 2019; Jinesh GG et al., 2018), gastric glandular cancer (Merkin RD et al., 2017), gallbladder adenocarcinoma (Ide M et al., 2012) and head and neck scalelike cell cancer (Kim K et al., 2017; Rickman DS et al., 2008; Franco G et al., 2020). There is no study to probe the pertinence between KRT17 and endometrial carcinoma. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the expression of KRT17 in endometrial carcinoma tissues as well as its therapeutic and prognostic significance.
To compare the expression of Keratin 17 between tumor tissues and normal tissue specimens, we used RNA-seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data library for endometrial carcinomas, and detecte the relation among Keratin 17 expression levels and clinicopathological characteristics of endometrial carcinoma in this study. Then, we assessed the prognostic value of Keratin 17 in endometrial carcinoma. In the end, by analyzing the correlation between keratin 17 expression and immune invasion, the underlying mechanism of keratin 17 regulating the occurrence and progress of endometrial carcinoma was completely observed. We propose the following article according to the list of Materials Design Analysis Reporting (MDAR) inventory (Liu Z et al., 2020).