PTEN as a Novel Diagnostic and Prognostic Biomarker of Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Abstract

This review article explores phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN)’s role in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) through comprehensive expression and methylation examinations, genetic mutation investigation, and prognostic evaluation. Using the UALCAN informational collection, PTEN expression examination uncovered a critical over-expression in HNSCC cells isolated from normal control samples, proposing its role in HNSCC multiplication. Further, analysis of PTEN expression across various clinical limits has shown critical up-regulation in different cancer development stages, racial groups, gender, and age classes within the context of HNSCC patients, suggesting its major role in cancer duplication. PTEN expression was validated by utilizing the GEPIA2.0 online tool, which showed PTEN expression was particularly significantly expressed in HNSCC cancer improvement when it appeared differently from normal control samples. Accordingly, examining PTEN validation across different phases of cancer advancement showed dysregulation in each of the four phases with the most raised expression in stage I and the least expression in stage IV. Thus, this study investigated the promoter methylation level of PTEN, figuring out a basic relationship between HNSCC samples and normal control samples. Analyzing promoter methylation across various clinical limits uncovered massive variations, with specific methylation patterns seen across malignant growth stages, race groups, gender, and age groups. Overall survival and disease-free survival (OS and DFS) utilizing the KM plotter tool showed a critical relationship between PTEN expression levels in HNSCC patients, showing high PTEN expression exhibited good overall survival when showed up distinctively comparable to low PTEN expression levels. In addition, in disease-free survival (DFS) evaluation HNSCC patients showing low PTEN expression experienced great DFS relative to HNSCC patients with high PTEN expression. Moreover, to validate PTEN expression against survival, the study examined the HNSCC patients into low and high-expression groups of PTEN. In HNSCC, low PTEN expression was connected with great overall survival (OS) when it appeared contrastingly relative to the high PTEN expression. In like manner, the study found that low PTEN expression level was connected with great DFS in HNSCC when it appeared contrastingly related to the high PTEN expression group. Genetic mutation analysis via cBioPortal identifies a minimal proportion of PTEN mutations in HNSCC, predominantly in-frame mutation, missense mutation, splice mutation, truncating mutation, and structural variant, indicating their basal significance in PTEN dysregulation within HNSCC. Further investigation of PTEN molecular components and their exchange inside the HNSCC microenvironment might disclose novel roads for designated treatment and accurate medication approaches in battling this harmful disease.