A recent study by the American Cancer Society reported that colorectal cancer has the third highest (10.0%) incidence rate after female breast cancer (11.7%) and lung cancer (11.4%) (Sung et al., 2021). The incidence rate of colorectal cancer in developed countries is approximately four times higher than that in developing countries (Fidler et al., 2016). Based on the current prediction models, the global incidence of colorectal cancer has been estimated to reach approximately 2.2 million new cases/year by 2030, accounting for 20% of all patients with cancer (Araghi et al., 2018). Colorectal carcinoma has the second-highest death rate of 9.4% after lung cancer. The official statistics on the prognosis of patients with colorectal cancer published by the American Cancer Society report that the 5 year survival rate is approximately 64% (Sung et al., 2021). Specifically, early diagnosis or detection of colorectal cancer at stage I, stage IIA or IIB increases the 5 years survival rate to approximately 90%; however, delayed diagnosis decreases the survival rate of patients with pathological stage IV tumour to approximately 14% (Pilonis et al., 2020). Although the current screening of colorectal cancer has been strengthened, resulting in a slight decrease in late diagnosis case numbers, up to 90% of cases are diagnosed after symptoms appear (Vanessa and Karen, 2016).

The occurrence of colorectal cancer is attributed to complex genetic and environmental factor interactions, involving multiple genes at different stages. The main pathways include the chromosomal instability pathway, CpG island methylator phenotype pathway, microsatellite instability pathway and the serrated pathway (Harrison and Benziger, 2011). Colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) is the main manifestation of colorectal cancer, with more than 80% of colorectal cancers being diagnosed as COAD (Li and Gu, 2005). The initial stage of COAD usually shows no obvious clinical symptoms, and the lack of effective screening or highly sensitive and specific diagnostic indicators often lead to missed treatment opportunities (Garborg et al., 2013). Therefore, it is crucial to establish an effective screening mechanism to improve the early diagnosis rate.

Collagen triple helix repeat containing 1 (CTHRC1) protein was first identified in the injured arteries of rats as an extracellular secretory protein, which is expressed in the injured part and smooth muscle cells of neointima, mainly promoting the growth and proliferation of newly generated cells (Leclair and Lindner, 2007). CTHRC1 regulates the occurrence and development of cervical, pancreatic and liver carcinoma by participating in cell proliferation, cell migration, type I collagen synthesis and damaged vascular repair (Tameda et al., 2014). Studies have shown that promoting CTHRC1 expression increased the migration and invasion of primary gastrointestinal stromal tumour cells, whereas silencing CTHRC1 expression inhibited the epithelial–mesenchymal transformation of glioblastoma cells (Ma et al., 2014). CTHRC1 promotes the proliferation of colorectal cancer by activating the Wnt/PCP signalling pathway (Yang et al., 2015). Additionally, CTHRC1 plays an important role in the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus and other diseases (Wu et al., 2018).

This study, therefore, aimed to evaluate the application potential of CTHRC1 as an early diagnosis and prognostic survival monitoring biomarker for COAD. Additionally, the molecular mechanism of COAD occurrence and development along with various novel therapeutic targets were explored. Therefore, the expression of CTHRC1 in COAD at the mRNA and protein levels was investigated using various tumour databases. By evaluating the expression of CTHRC1 in patients with COAD under different physiological and pathological conditions, the application potential of CTHRC1 as a diagnostic indicator was determined. Moreover, the effects of different expression levels and genetic mutations of CTHRC1 on COAD survival rate was analysed, including the immune infiltration of CTHRC1 in COAD. Further, the associated proteins and pathways of CTHRC1 in tumorigenesis are also discussed.

Biomarkers are key tools for early diagnosis, prediction of survival and prognosis, and evaluation of treatment responses. Effective biomarkers benefit clinical decision-making and improve the patient’s survival rate and life quality (Ogunwobi et al., 2020). With the development of omics technology, many potential indicator genes have been screened for various diseases, such as adenomatous polyposis, transforming growth factor β and several tumour suppressors, which are widely used in the auxiliary diagnosis of tumorigenesis (Fodde et al., 2001; Gyorffy et al., 2013; Seoane and Gomis, 2017). However, the clinical application of these indicator genes is limited due to the lack of sufficient systematic research.

CTHRC1 is a glycosylated protein secreted during tissue repair, which functions by reducing the collagen matrix deposition, thereby promoting cell migration. The expression of CTHRC1 under physiological conditions promotes wound healing; however, the pathological overexpression of CTHRC1 promotes tumour cell growth and invasion (Cheng et al., 2019). Studies have shown that CTHRC1 promotes colorectal cancer metastasis by inducing the Wnt/PCP signal transduction (Yang et al., 2015). In hepatocellular carcinoma, supressing CTHRC1 expression can inhibit integrin β, and thereby inhibiting cell migration and invasion and inducing apoptosis (Zhou et al., 2019). Additionally, CTHRC1 promotes the invasion of human epithelial ovarian cancer cells by activating the epidermal growth factor receptor signalling pathway (Ye et al., 2016). In short, the tumour promoting mechanism of CTHRC1 involves multiple targets.

The occurrence and development of COAD have the common characteristics of tumorigenesis. It promotes the massive proliferation of cells by avoiding growth inhibitory factors and apoptosis-related genes and the production of tumour blood vessels to induce tumour development. Tumorigenesis mechanisms are also attributed to unstable gene expression, tumour microenvironment change, genetic diversity and inflammatory factor activation (Goubran et al., 2014). To understand the mechanism of CTHRC1 in COAD and evaluate its potential as a diagnostic and prognostic indicator in patients with COAD, various online public databases were used to systematically investigate CTHRC1 expression profiles in COAD tissue, its impact on patient survival and immunity, and its related functional pathways and associated proteins. The consistently high expression of CTHRC1 in patients with COAD under different physiological and pathological states reflects its stability as a diagnostic indicator. Moreover, CTHRC1 was highly expressed in at least 16 tumour types (Tang et al., 2006), which broadened the application of CTHRC1 in early disease detection. Tumours usually have the characteristics of high metastasis tendency. Hence, patients aged 21–40 years and/or with Stage I COAD are more likely to obtain satisfying treatment responses; however, they are not easily diagnosed at the early stages. Notably, CTHRC1 was obviously highly-expressed in these patients, which further highlights its value as an indicator gene. Further analysis of the prognostic value revealed that the characteristics of the high hazard ratio of CTHRC1 expression and significant differences in prognostic survival indicate the superiority of CTHRC1 as a prognostic biomarker, even the high mutation frequency would not offset its indicating effect on prognosis. Therefore, these data emphasise the high value of CTHRC1 as a diagnostic and prognostic indicator for patients with COAD.

During tumorigenesis, due to the intervention of non-coding RNA, such as microRNA, the expression level of mRNA may be inconsistent with that of the associated protein (Macfarlane and Murphy, 2010). Taking this into account, the gene and protein levels were detected separately, revealing that in transcriptional and translational level, CTHRC1 was both highly expressed in COAD tissues. Since the time-consuming, laborious and expensive method of protein level detection, the follow-up investigation is mainly based on the analysis of mRNA level, which ensures the effectiveness and improves the convenience of CTHRC1 for future clinical research and application.

The response mechanism of the immune system in tumorigenesis has always been a popular research topic. The fluctuation of the tumour microenvironment is strongly related to the progress and treatment of the tumour. Understanding the tumour microenvironment provides an insight into tumour diagnosis, therapeutic targets and prognostic biomarkers (Goubran et al., 2014). The correlation analysis between CTHRC1 level and B cell infiltration showed no significant correlation, which suggests that COAD avoided the immune effect of B cells. However, this observation needs further verification by deeper and profound studies. CTHRC1 showed a close correlation (>0.5) with the infiltration levels of macrophages, neutrophils, dendritic cells and immune cell biomarker genes, which could be used as early screening targets for immunotherapy.

Through the enrichment analyses of GO and KEGG, the mechanism of CTHRC1 in biological processes, not only its cellular components and molecular function were defined, but also the specific regulatory pathways (such as AGE-RAGE, Relaxin and Pl3K signalling pathways) and action targets (including protein digestion and absorption, ECM-receptor interaction, focal adhesion and platelet activation) were identified, most of which are classical regulatory models that promote tumorigenesis or are involved in tumour development (Feng et al., 2009; Bao et al., 2019; Waghela et al., 2021). Therefore, unravelling the tumour promoting mechanism of CTHRC1could narrow the scope of further research and drug screening.

The promoting effect of CTHRC1 on tumour metastasis and proliferation could be considered a contributing factor to its abnormal high expression in various cancers including COAD. After systematic analysis, this study recommends CTHRC1 as a biomarker gene for the early diagnosis and prognostic monitoring of COAD. This study aims to provide a base for future research, regarding the molecular mechanism and therapeutics development for COAD. However, verification of the clinical applications is still lacking although this study uses many databases for comprehensive analyses and comparison.