Identification a Novel Autophagy-Related Long Non-Coding RNA Prognostic Signature for Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma

Abstract

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PAAD) is one of the most common malignant tumors in the digestive system. At present, the prognosis and 5-year survival time are still unsatisfied. Autophagic genes have been demonstrated as a crucial factor in pancreatic cancer progression, we studied the potential prognostic value of autophagy associated long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) in patients with pancreatic cancer. In our research, we summarized five autophagy-related lncRNAs based on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) pancreatic cancer patient’s data. According to the prognostic lncRNAs, we established a prognostic risk signature and then divided all the patients into low-risk or high-risk groups based on their risk scores. The overall survival (OS) time in the high-risk group is shorter than low risk group (HR=3.75, 95%CI: 2.45-5.73, p<0.001). The autophagy-related lncRNA signature was an independent prognostic predictor with an AUC value of 0.694 (1 year) and 0.703 (5 year). Nomogram was constructed to predict the patients’ survival probabilities based on the risk scores. Gene set enrichment analysis was performed to detect the signaling pathway involved in the different groups, which revealed the related genes were markedly enriched in multiple signaling pathways in high or low- risk group. Moreover, we examined these lncRNAs expression in HPNE cells and three pancreatic cancer cell lines including Mia- PaCa-2, CFPAC-1 and Panc-1. In addition, the biological function between the high and low risk groups was significantly different. We also analyzed the relationship between the autophagy-related lncRNAs signature and pancreatic cancer infiltration lymphocytes via CIBERSORT method in this study. To summarize, the 5-autophagy related lncRNAs we screened in this study has prognostic capability for PAAD and may play a crucial role in pancreatic cancer biology progress.