Integrated Bioinformatic Analyses Reveal Thioredoxin as a Putative Marker of Cancer Stem Cells and Prognosis in Prostate Cancer.

Objectives: Prostate cancer stem cells (CSCs) play an important role in cancer cell survival, proliferation, metastasis, and recurrence; thus, removing CSCs is important for complete cancer removal. However, the mechanisms underlying CSC functions remain largely unknown, making it difficult to develop new anticancer drugs targeting CSCs. Herein, we aimed to identify novel factors that regulate stemness and predict prognosis. Methods: We reanalyzed 2 single-cell RNA sequencing data of prostate cancer (PCa) tissues using Seurat. We used gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) to estimate CSCs and identified common upregulated genes in CSCs between these datasets. To investigate whether its expression levels change over CSC differentiation, we performed a trajectory analysis using monocle 3. In addition, GSEA helped us understand how the identified genes regulate stemness. Finally, to assess their clinical significance, we used the Cancer Genome Atlas database to evaluate their impact on prognosis. Results: The expression of thioredoxin ( Conclusions: Despite the limited sample size in our study and the need for further in vitro and in vivo experiments to demonstrate whether TXN functionally regulates prostate CSCs, our findings suggest that TXN may serve as a novel therapeutic target against CSCs. Moreover, TXN expression in CSCs could be a useful marker for predicting the prognosis of PCa patients.