TITLE:
Research on Lumican (LUM) Expression Characteristics in Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma and Its Regulatory Function within the Tumor Immune Microenvironment
AUTHORS:
Junfa Chen, Haizhen Li
KEYWORDS:
Pancreatic Cancer, Lumican, Immune Microenvironment, Biomarker, Molecular Mechanism
JOURNAL NAME:
Yangtze Medicine,
Vol.10 No.3,
August
17,
2026
ABSTRACT: Pancreatic cancer remains a major clinical hurdle, largely because it is often detected late and shows strong resistance to existing therapies. This situation calls for new molecular biomarkers that could support early diagnosis and guide precision treatment. Using publicly available datasets from UCSC XENA and GTEx, the work reported here systematically assessed how the Lumican (LUM) gene behaves in pancreatic adenocarcinoma and whether its expression carries clinical relevance. Tumor tissues exhibited markedly higher LUM levels compared with normal samples, and this difference yielded excellent diagnostic accuracy (AUC = 0.964) for distinguishing malignant from benign tissues. On the other hand, no meaningful ties were seen between LUM expression and routine clinical variables such as age, sex, tumor stage, or race. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) pointed to a strong link between high LUM expression and immune-related pathways, including complement activation, humoral immune responses, and B-cell receptor signaling. Further immune infiltration analysis based on a single sample. GSEA (ssGSEA) showed that LUM expression correlated extensively with various immune cell subsets, with the most notable positive association involving central memory CD8+ T lymphocytes (ρ = 0.759; P