Association of Ras-Raf-MEK-Erk/JNK pathway mutations with overall survival for lung squamous cell carcinoma patients.

Abstract

e14754 Background: Genomic alterations often lead to aberrant signaling pathways which play an important role in tumorigenesis and development. Here we report the mutational status of genes associated with the Ras-Raf-MEK-Erk/JNK signaling pathway as a biomarker for predicting overall survival (OS) for Lung squamous cell carcinoma (SQCC) patients. Methods: We used the cBioPortal platform to analyze a cohort of 494 SQCC samples from TCGA data. The general Ras-Raf-MEK-Erk/JNK signaling pathway includes 26 genes (KRAS, HRAS, BRAF, RAF1, MAP3K1, MAP3K2, MAP3K3, MAP3K4, MAP3K5, MAP2K1, MAP2K2, MAP2K3, MAP2K4, MAP2K5, MAPK1, MAPK3, MAPK4, MAPK6, MAPK7, MAPK8, MAPK9, MAPK12, MAPK14, DAB2, RASSF1, RAB25). We analyzed the number of samples with/without mutations in the Ras-Raf-MEK-Erk/JNK pathway and found is 214 and 284 that had, or didn’t have, mutations in this pathway, respectively. The overall survival of these two groups was analyzed using the Kaplan-Meier Estimate, and the statistical difference between these groups was calculated using the log-rank test afterwards. Results: The log-rank test p-value is 2.086e-3, which indicates a significant difference in the overall survival between the two groups. It shows that the group with alterations in the Ras-Raf-MEK-Erk/JNK signaling pathway had a longer overall survival than the group without those alterations. The details are as follows: Conclusions: Ras-Raf-MEK-Erk/JNK pathway mutations are significantly associated with longer OS for lung SQCC patients. Mutations in this pathway can be a potential indicator for SQCC patients, but the biological reasons behind this relationship remain to be explored.[Table: see text]