cBioportal is great but it is limited by the fact that it does not display data for adjacent normal samples. You could check your gene out in the UCSC cancer genome browser by selecting a cancer and dataset and then searching for your gene of interest (link below).  You can sort expression data by all sorts of clinical characteristics etc (ie tumor vs normal, stage-wise, survival length, etc). However, for publication-quality analysis and figure preparation there is no way around downloading the expression data directly from TCGA or using firehose_get from the Broad Institute (link below) and analyzing it (I use R). That being said, I dont quite understand what you are asking so if you clarify I may be able to provide better help.

https://genome-cancer.ucsc.edu/proj/site/hgHeatmap/

https://confluence.broadinstitute.org/display/GDAC/Download

Dear Aamira,

if you are still interested I can suggest you to try our new R package TCGAbiolinks. In particular you can take a look in our NAR paper or related Bionconductor's vignette.

https://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/vignettes/TCGAbiolinks/inst/doc/tcgaBiolinks.html

For further informations or collaborations you can write me ([email protected]).

Best,

Antonio Colaprico

Article TCGAbiolinks: An R/Bioconductor package for integrative anal...