Alternatively spliced forms of
fibronectin, called
oncofetal fibronectin, are aberrantly expressed in
cancer, with little to no expression in normal tissue, making them attractive
biomarkers to exploit for
tumor-targeted
therapeutics and diagnostics. While prior studies have explored
oncofetal fibronectin expression in limited
cancer types and limited sample sizes, no studies have performed a large-scale pan-
cancer analysis in the context of clinical diagnostics and prognostics to posit the utility of these
biomarkers across multiple
cancer types. In this study,
RNA-Seq data sourced from the UCSC Toil Recompute project were extracted and analyzed to determine the correlation between the expression of
oncofetal fibronectin, including extradomain A and extradomain B
fibronectin, and patient diagnosis and prognosis. We determined that
oncofetal fibronectin is significantly overexpressed in most
cancer types relative to corresponding normal tissues. In addition, strong correlations exist between increasing
oncofetal fibronectin expression levels and
tumor stage, lymph node activity, and histological grade at the time of diagnosis. Furthermore,
oncofetal fibronectin expression is shown to be significantly associated with overall patient survival within a 10-year window. Thus, the results presented in this study suggest
oncofetal fibronectin as a commonly upregulated
biomarker in
cancer with the potential to be used for
tumor-selective diagnosis and treatment applications.