Introduction: Every year one million people are infected by colorectal cancer. This emerging population increases the need of new ways to diagnosis and treatment of this cancer. Today we use molecular methods to investigate the under lying mechanism of this disease. Even though we have data from NGS platforms which give us more information than what we need, but these information cannot detect the differences between cancer stages. The main problem is the lack of right programs. In this article we extract NGS data of forty biopsies from GEO database; we analyze them by GEO2R and compare with more than two thousand pathways with Reactome and DAVID package.
Methods: The subsets of SRA files have been downloaded from SRA-NCBI. The Data has been analysed by GEO2R and Heat maps have been made. The functional network of differential expressed genes have been draw and Kegg pathway has been extracted. Each sample and its P plot has been revised separatelyand Anova test has been done for the comparison of genes.
Results: This analysis demonstrated that fibroblast growth factor family and their receptors have an important role in progression of this cancer. The most important one among them is FGF2R. The role of this receptor can be anticipated by its impact on other cancers and its downstream molecular networks such as ERK and PLC pathways. More investigation on two hundred candidates of this pathway shows that FGF8 indicate significant difference in expression level on different stage of colorectal cancer. ANOVA test for FGF8 expression level demonstrates a significant change between cancer stages to each other, in addition to controls. Minimum expression level is in first stage, and as it goes to next stage the expression level will rise with it and the maximum level reached at fourth stage.
Conclusion: This data demonstrate that FGF8 can be use as a biomarker to identify the stage of cancer and progression. In addition this finding indicates that FGF8 can play pivotal role in metastasis and cell cycle regulation in this particular cancer.