Introduction:
Endometrial cancer is one of the most common
uterine cancers worldwide. AKT is reported to regulate
progesterone receptor B dependent transcription and angiogenesis in
endometrial cancer. However, the potential mechanisms of AKT in the
tumor progression of
endometrial cancer remain unclear. Methods: We used GSE72708 with gene expression profiles of AKT regulation from the GEO database. We performed GSEA analysis to explore pathway enrichments. We found that most upregulated enriched pathways in siAKT group were associated with
acid metabolism and immune network.
Endometrial cancer and various signaling pathways were downregulated enriched. Moreover, different molecular mechanism of regulation between
progestin (
R5020) and AKT was identified, which were related to
VEGF signaling pathway. The hub genes were evaluated by immunohistochemical staining of
endometrial cancer tissues. Results: We screened out a total of 623 differentially expressed genes among different groups. According to weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) method, four distinct modules were identified. We found brown module showed a very high positive correlation with siAKT group and a very high negative correlation with
R5020 group. A total of six hub genes including PBK, BIRC5,
AURKA, GTSE1, KNSTRN, and PSMB10 were finally identified associated with AKT1. In addition, the data also shows that the higher expression of AKT1, GTSE1, BIRC5,
AURKA, and KNSTRN is significantly associate with poor prognosis of
endometrial cancer. Conclusion: Our study identified six hub genes related to the prognosis of
endometrial cancer, which may provide new insights into the underlying
biological mechanisms driving the
tumorigenesis of
endometrial cancer, especially in AKT1 regulation.