Discovery Potential Therapeutic Drugs for Oral Tongue Squamous Cell Carcinoma Based on Text Mining and Data Analysis

Abstract

Background: Oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma (OTSCC) is the most common malignant tumor of the oral cavity. The aim of this study was to use text mining and data analysis to discover some existing drugs that target genes and to explore potential therapeutic drugs for OTSCC. Methods: We used the text mining tool pubmed2ensembl to extract genes associated with OTSCC, and two datasets (GSE30784, GSE23558) from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) were used for the data analysis. Then, Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) analyses were performed for the intersection of the three gene sets. Protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was constructed by STRING, gene module analysis was performed using the Molecular Complex Detection (MCODE), a plug-in in Cytoscape. Lastly, a database of drug-gene interactions was used to identify significant genes to explore potential drugs for the treatment of OTSCC.Results: We produced 403 unique genes associated with oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma through text mining. GSE23558 and GSE 30784 obtained 1637 and 1159 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) through data analysis, respectively. A total of 28 genes were obtained from the intersection gene sets, including 20 up-regulated genes and 8 down-regulated genes. We screened the most significant modules by using MCODE, among which 8 genes were associated with oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma as core genes. Eventually, nine drugs were found to target eight genes.Conclusions: In this study, PLAU, SERPINE1, MMP1, MMP3, MMP10, CXCL10, CXCL12, and SPP1 were potentially key genes involved in the treatment of OTSCC. Furthermore, 12 drugs were identified as potential therapeutic agents for oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma treatment and management