Glycoprotein non-metastatic
melanoma protein B (GPNMB), a transmembrane
glycoprotein, has been reported to be involved in
tumor progression, but its prognostic value for
glioma and the mechanistic effects on
glioma progression have not been clearly explored. The present study aimed to investigate the prognostic role of GPNMB in
glioma and the potential mechanisms of how GPNMB mediates
glioma progression. Differentially expressed genes between the four highest and four lowest GPNMB expression samples in the GSE53733 dataset were first determined. Gene ontology, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway enrichment analysis and Gene set enrichment analysis results demonstrated that the significantly enriched pathways in samples with high GPNMB expression compared with those with low GPNMB expression were associated with
hypoxia, angiogenesis, migration and invasion. Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to investigate the correlations between GPNMB expression and the markers of
hypoxia, angiogenesis, migration and invasion in GSE53733, which were further validated using another
mRNA microarray dataset from the Chinese
Glioma Genome Atlas (CGGA). In addition, using the CGGA dataset, high GPNMB expression was demonstrated to be significantly associated with advanced WHO grade and short survival time in patients with
glioma. Of note, based on the immunohistochemical staining of the tissue microarrays, Kaplan-Meier analysis with the Renyi test and a Cox proportional hazards model were used to validate the unfavorable prognostic role of high GPNMB expression in
glioma. In conclusion, high GPNMB expression may be associated with high
tumor grade and unfavorable prognosis in
glioma. GPNMB expression was demonstrated to correlate with the markers of
hypoxia, angiogenesis, migration and invasion, which may be potential mechanisms through which GPNMB mediates
glioma progression.