Identification of critical genes and pathways related to venous thromboembolism in non-small cell lung cancer patients using integrated bioinformatics analysis

Abstract Background: Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients have a significantly higher risk of developing venous thromboembolism (VTE). Although many driver mutations as well as some susceptibility loci for VTE have been identified in NSCLC, the critical genome atlas of NSCLC patients complicated with VTE and relevant molecular mechanisms are yet to be fully understood. The aim of this study is to investigate the critical genes and pathways related to VTE in NSCLC patients using integrated bioinformatics analysis.Results: RNA-Seq data of 1014 NSCLC samples were collected and analyzed systematically to identify the potential risk genes of NSCLC, while VTE risk genes were obtained from the associated study. The VTE risk genes with differential expression among NSCLC were further subjected to pathway enrichment analysis and protein-protein interaction network (PPI) analysis to determine the potential pathways associated with developing VTE in NSCLC patients. This study identified a total of 22 genes with differential expression in the NSCLC group, which can be defined as VTE risk genes based on previous studies. The PPI network analysis demonstrated that among the 22 encoded proteins, 21 including VWF, F2, F8, and four blood coagulation associated proteins were located in the central part of the network. The bioinformatics analysis further identified enriched pathways with statistical significance (P < 0.05), most of which were associated with blood coagulation.Conclusions: This study reveals that potential risk genes of NSCLC-associated VTE are enriched in blood coagulation associated pathways, suggesting a significant role of blood coagulation in VTE development of NSCLC patients.