Fascin actin-bundling protein 1 (FSCN1), a member of actin cytoskeletal protein family genes, plays critical roles in cell migration, motility, adhesion, and other cellular interactions. It has shown its ascending importance in tumors of multiple systems, including the nervous system, respiratory system, digestive system and urinary system. Nevertheless, no systematic pan-cancer analysis has been carried out to investigate its function in diagnosis, prognosis, and immunological prediction. We used UCSC Xena, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Genotype Tissue Expression Project (GTEx), Human Protein Atlas (HPA), cBioPortal, STRING, Cancer single-cell state Atlas (CancerSEA), Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) and Xiantao Academic analysis tool websites and databases for the extraction of pan-cancer data on FSCN1. We adopted bioinformatics methods to explore the potential role of FSCN1 in pan-cancer, including analysis of the correlation between FSCN1 and clinicopathologic features, prognosis, genetic alteration, immune, DNA methylation, single cell function and drug sensitivity. Furthermore, a protein–protein interaction network was drawn, and gene set enrichment analysis was conducted to explore the functions of FSCN1. Finally, we validated the effects of FSCN1 on cell proliferation and apoptosis through experiments. The findings of the comprehensive pan-cancer analysis revealed that FSCN1 was highly expressed in most cancers, except in acute myeloid leukemia, prostate adenocarcinoma and thyroid carcinoma, and it has a certain diagnostic and prognosis value in many cancers. Furthermore, FSCN1 expression was found to correlate with immune cell infiltration, immune checkpoint (ICP) genes expression, DNA methylation and drug sensitivity in a variety of cancers. In addition, we discovered that FSCN1 participated in the proliferation and DNA repair at the single-cell level. Besides, Gene function enrichment analyses revealed that genes that were co-expressed with FSCN1 were enriched within the actin filament regulation pathways. CCK-8 assay and flow cytometry apoptosis assay results indicated that FSCN1 knockdown inhibited proliferation and induced apoptosis in mesothelioma (MESO). FSCN1 is a prospective marker for the diagnosis, prognosis, immunology, chemotherapy, and small molecular drugs targeted for pan-cancer treatment.
Xu et al. (2026) studied this question.