Abstract:

Increasing number of evidence demonstrated increased SARS-CoV-2 infection risk in cancer. Despite various studies shed light on SARS-CoV-2 mediated pathways upregulated in cancer, there is still ongoing efforts to reveal underlying mechanisms of elevated risk for COVID-19 disease in cancer. Given critical role of CEACAM1 in immune exhaustion and immune deregulation observed both in cancer and COVID-19, systematic characterization of CEACAM1 in different malignancies was performed with an ultimate aim to identify the involvement of CEACAM1 in enhanced COVID-19 susceptibility in cancer patients. Here we show that CEACAM1 expression was upregulated in a number of TCGA samples. In addition, CEACAM1 expression was positively correlated with SARS-CoV-2 infection genes in TCGA samples. Single-cell RNA sequencing analysis results of COVID-19 positive patients indicated upregulation of CEACAM1 expression. Furthermore, CEACAM1 expression was associated with HAVCR2, an immune checkpoint marker, and there was a correlation between CEACAM1 and HAVCR2 levels in different TCGA samples. Collectively, CEACAM1 might provide increased susceptibility of COVID-19 disease in cancer patients which might be explained with its interaction with HAVCR2.

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