Background: Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and skin cutaneous melanoma (SKCM) are common tumors around the world. However, the prognosis in advanced patients is poor. Because NLRP3 was not extensively studied in cancers, so that we aimed to identify the impact of NLRP3 on LUAD and SKCM through bioinformatics analyses.
Methods: TCGA and TIMER database were utilized in this study. We compared the expression of NLRP3 in different cancers and evaluated its influence on survival of LUAD and SKCM patients. The correlations between clinical information and NLRP3 expression were analyzed using logistic regression. Clinicopathologic characteristics associated with overall survival in were analyzed by Cox regression. In addition, we explored the correlation between NLRP3 and immune infiltrates. GSEA and co-expressed gene with NLRP3 were also done in this study.
Results: NLRP3 expressed disparately in tumor tissues and normal tissues. Cox regression analysis indicated that up-regulated NLRP3 was an independent prognostic factor for good prognosis in LUAD and SKCM. Logistic regression analysis showed increased NLRP3 expression was significantly correlated with favorable clinicopathologic parameters such as no lymph node invasion and no distant metastasis. Specifically, a positive correlation between increased NLRP3 expression and immune infiltrating level of various immune cells was observed.
Conclusion: Together with all these findings, increased NLRP3 expression correlates with favorable prognosis and increased proportion of immune cells in LUAD and SKCM. These conclusions indicate that NLRP3 can serve as a potential biomarker for evaluating prognosis and immune infiltration level.