AccScience Publishing / TD / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/TD025190036
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

RIBC2 expression as a potential diagnostic and prognostic biomarker associated with tumor progression and immune modulation in breast cancer

Zhuoyu Li1 ,  Luobin Lin1 ,  Zhiwei Liao1 ,  Shimin Lin1 ,  Wenmei Wu1*
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1 Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Drug Delivery, Guangdong Provincial Engineering Center of Topical Precise Drug Delivery System, School of Life Sciences and Biopharmaceutics, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
Tumor Discovery, 025190036 https://doi.org/10.36922/TD025190036
Received: 8 May 2025 | Revised: 6 September 2025 | Accepted: 8 September 2025 | Published online: 10 October 2025
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

Breast cancer remains one of the deadliest diseases around the world. This study systematically investigates the expression profile and clinical significance of RIBC2 in breast cancer. By integrating multi-omics data from public databases, such as The Cancer Genome Atlas and The Genotype-Tissue Expression project, combined with bioinformatic analyses and molecular docking simulations, we demonstrated that RIBC2 is significantly overexpressed in breast cancer tissues. Elevated RIBC2 expression was positively correlated with higher T stage, advanced pathological stage, and poorer overall survival. Functional enrichment analyses indicated that RIBC2 may facilitate tumor invasion by regulating extracellular matrix remodeling and activating the mitogen-activated protein kinase signaling pathway. Multivariate Cox regression analysis confirmed high RIBC2 expression as an independent poor prognostic factor, with its inclusion slightly increasing the area under the curve of the prognostic model from 0.762 to 0.764. Moreover, immune infiltration analysis revealed that high RIBC2 expression was associated with increased infiltration of regulatory T cells and M2-polarized macrophages, indicating a potential role in shaping an immune suppressive tumor microenvironment. Spearman correlation analysis between RIBC2 and immune checkpoints showed significant positive associations only for lymphocyte activation gene 3 protein (p<0.001, absolute correlation ≈ 0.1) and human leukocyte antigen-C (p=0.045, absolute correlation ≈ 0.08), indicating RIBC2 may selectively modulate specific immunosuppressive pathways. Drug sensitivity analysis further suggested that RIBC2 overexpression may contribute to chemotherapy resistance. The methylation level of RIBC2 was found to be significantly negatively correlated with its expression, suggesting that hypermethylation in the promoter or regulatory regions may suppress gene expression through epigenetic silencing mechanisms. Furthermore, quantitative polymerase chain reaction revealed a 4.2-fold RIBC2 upregulation in triple-negative breast cancer cells (MDA-MB-231) compared to normal mammary cells (Hs578bst), exceeding levels in luminal subtypes (MCF-7). Collectively, these findings highlight RIBC2 as a promising prognostic biomarker and provide a theoretical foundation for developing combination therapeutic strategies targeting RIBC2.

Keywords
Breast cancer
RIBC2
Prognostic marker
Metastasis
Immunity
Funding
This work was supported by the Guangdong Provincial Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Project (No. 20251216) and the College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program (No. S202410573014).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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Tumor Discovery, Electronic ISSN: 2810-9775 Print ISSN: 3060-8597, Published by AccScience Publishing
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