Identification of an ACK1/TNK2-based prognostic signature for colon cancer to predict survival and inflammatory landscapes

Abstract Activated Cdc42-associated kinase 1 (ACK1), a kind of tyrosine kinase, is considered to be an oncogene in many cancers, and it is likely to become a potential target for cancer treatment. We found that the expression of the ACK1 gene in colon cancer was higher than that in normal tissues adjacent to cancer, and high expression of the ACK1 gene was associated with poor prognosis of patients. We assessed the prognosis of colon cancer based on ACK1-related genes and constructed a model that can predict the prognosis of colon cancer patients in colon cancer data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. We then explored the relationship between ACK1 and the immune microenvironment of colon cancer. The overexpression of ACK1 might hinder the function of antigen-presenting cells. The colon cancer prognosis prediction model we constructed has certain significance for clinicians to judge the prognosis of patients with colon cancer. The expression of the ACK1 gene might affect the infiltration level of a variety of immune cells and immunomodulators in the immune microenvironment.