Abstract
PurposeThere is plenty of evidence showing that autophagy plays an important role in the biological process of cancer. The purpose of this study was to establish a novel autophagy-related prognostic marker for lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC).MethodsThe mRNA microarray and clinical data in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) were analyzed by using a univariate Cox proportional regression model to select candidate autophagy-related prognostic genes. Bioinformatics analysis of gene function using the Gene Ontology (GO) and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) platforms was performed. A multivariate Cox proportional regression model helped to develop a prognostic signature from the pool of candidate genes. On the basis of this prognostic signature, we could divide LUAD and LUSC patients into high-risk and low-risk groups. Further survival analysis demonstrated that high-risk patients had significantly shorter disease-free survival (DFS) than low-risk patients. The signature which contains six autophagy-related genes (EIF4EBP1, TP63, BNIP3, ATIC, ERO1A and FADD) showed good performance for predicting the survival of LUAD and LUSC patients by having a better Area Under Curves (AUC) than other clinical parameters. Its efficacy was also validated by data from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database.ConclusionCollectively, the prognostic signature we proposed is a promising biomarker for monitoring the outcomes of LUAD and LUSC.
Highlights
Lung cancer is a fatal malignancy worldwide and is one of the leading causes of death caused by malignant tumors
According to the histological classification, lung cancer is divided into small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) and non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the latter of which accounts for approximately 85% of all cases (Neal, Hamilton & Rogers, 2014)
Our study indicates that autophagy may be a promising target for the treatment of NSCLC
Summary
Lung cancer is a fatal malignancy worldwide and is one of the leading causes of death caused by malignant tumors. Squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma account for approximately 90% of the total NSCLC cases, which make them the most common types of lung cancer (Neal, Hamilton & Rogers, 2014). According to the present understanding, autophagy is involved in the innate and adaptive immune responses and can be induced by immune receptors such as Toll-like receptors and NLRs (nucleotide oligomerization domain-like receptors) (Cadwell, 2016) It takes part in the process of antigen presentation and the development of lymphocytes (Zhong, Sanchez-Lopez & Karin, 2016), which makes autophagy a possible target for improving immunotherapy in NSCLC. We revealed an autophagy-related risk signature involving six genes This signature can be used as an independent prognostic marker for LUAD and LUSC patients. Our study indicates that autophagy may be a promising target for the treatment of NSCLC
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