High expression of KIF4A predicts poor prognosis hallmark and is correlated with immune infiltrates in cervical cancer

Abstract Background Cervical cancer (CC) has become the fourth most common cancer among women and cause a larger number of deaths in worldwide. Screening at the early stage of CC is an effective precaution. Discovery of the new hallmark of CC will provide a guidance for CC screening. Kinesin family member 4A (KIF4A) expressed in a variety of tissues and also contributed to development of several cancers, however its function in CC remains unclear. Methods we download and analyzed the clinical information and mRNA profile of cervical cancer patients from TCGA and GTEx database. After normalization process, the expression values of KIF4A were calculated according to TCGA and GTEx data. We collected CC patient tissue samples from the Second Hospital of Anhui Medical University and detected KIF4A expression by IHC and WB. The immune cell infiltration analysis is preformed in the online analysis tool TIMER 2.0 (http://timer.cistrome.org/). Results The high-expression of KIF4A was demonstrated in the CC patients according to the bioinformatics analysis and clinical test. Additionally, loss-function of KIF4A with shRNA abrogated cervical cell proliferation, migration and invasion. We also found that the difference expression genes were identified between KIF4A − high and KIF4A − low CC patients among with abundant mutation of several genes occurred in the CC progression. Finally, we also proved that KIF4A was involved in the immune cell infiltration in the CC patients by clinical information analysis. These demonstrated that the dys-expression of KIF4A may be used for the CC screening and clinical therapy.