Abstract
Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) are involved in regulating physiological behaviors for various malignant tumors, including non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, few studies comprehensively evaluated both lncRNA–lncRNA interaction effects and main effects of lncRNA on overall survival of NSCLC. Hence, we performed a two-phase designed study of lncRNA expression in tumor tissues using 604 NSCLC patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas as the discovery phase and 839 patients from Gene Expression Omnibus as the validation phase. In the discovery phase, we adopted a two-step strategy, Screening before Testing, for dimension reduction and signal detection. These candidate lncRNAs first screened out by the weighted random forest (Ranger), were then tested through the Cox proportional hazards model adjusted for covariates. Significant lncRNAs with either type of effects aforementioned were carried forward into the validation phase to confirm their significances again. As a result, in the discovery phase, 19 lncRNAs were identified by Ranger, among which five lncRNAs and one pair of lncRNA–lncRNA interaction exhibited significant effects (FDR-q ≤ 0.05) main and interaction effects on NSCLC survival, respectively, through Cox model. After the independent validation, we finally observed that one lncRNA (ENSG00000227403.1) with main effect was robustly associated with NSCLC prognosis (HRdiscovery = 0.90, P = 1.20 × 10–3; HRvalidation = 0.94, P = 4.11 × 10–3) and one pair of lncRNAs (ENSG00000267121.4 and ENSG00000272369.1) had significant interaction effect on NSCLC survival (HRdiscovery = 1.12, P = 3.07 × 10–4; HRvalidation = 1.11, P = 0.0397). Our comprehensive NSCLC prognostic study of lncRNA provided population-level evidence for further functional study.
Highlights
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide (Sung et al 2021)
It is well known that majority of lung cancers are non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in histological classification, including lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) (Travis 2020)
Few studies ever focused on Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA)–lncRNA interaction effects on NSCLC overall survival, which may provide pivotal clues for the biologic mechanisms of complex diseases (Zhang et al 2019b) and enhance prediction accuracy (Chatterjee et al 2016; Li et al 2019)
Summary
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide (Sung et al 2021). It is well known that majority of lung cancers are non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in histological classification, including lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) (Travis 2020). Many studies have demonstrated that lncRNA plays an important role (e.g. oncogenes or tumor suppressors) in regulating the physiological behaviors of malignant tumors, including lung cancer (Schmitt and Chang 2016; Braicu et al 2019; Xu et al 2019). Few studies ever focused on lncRNA–lncRNA interaction effects on NSCLC overall survival, which may provide pivotal clues for the biologic mechanisms of complex diseases (Zhang et al 2019b) and enhance prediction accuracy (Chatterjee et al 2016; Li et al 2019). We performed a comprehensive analysis of lncRNAs to evaluate their main effects and interaction effects on NSCLC survival through a two-phase designed study, using 604 NSCLC patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) as the discovery phase and 839 patients from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) as the validation phase
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