Profiles of overall survival-related gene expression-based risk signature and their prognostic implications in clear cell renal cell carcinoma.

The present work aimed to evaluate the prognostic value of overall survival (OS)-related genes in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) and to develop a nomogram for clinical use. Transcriptome data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) were collected to screen differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between ccRCC patients with OS > 5 years (149 patients) and those < 1 year (52 patients). In TCGA training set (265 patients), seven DEGs (CYP3A7, CNTNAP5, ADCY2, TOX3, PLG, ENAM, and COL7A1) were further selected to build a prognostic risk signature by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator Cox regression model. Survival analysis confirmed that the OS in the high-risk group was dramatically shorter than their low-risk counterparts. Next, univariate and Multivariate Cox regression revealed the seven genes-based risk score, age, and TNM stage were independent prognostic factors to OS, based on which a novel nomogram was constructed and validated in both TCGA validation set (265 patients) and the International Cancer Genome Consortium cohort (ICGC, 84 patients). A decent predictive performance of the nomogram was observed, the C-indices and corresponding 95% confidence intervals of TCGA training set, validation set, and ICGC cohort were 0.78 (0.74-0.82), 0.75 (0.70-0.80), and 0.70 (0.60-0.80), respectively. Moreover, the calibration plots of 3- and 5 years survival probability indicated favorable curve-fitting performance in the above 3 groups. In conclusion, the proposed seven genes signature-based nomogram is a promising and robust tool for predicting the OS of ccRCC, which may help tailor individualized therapeutic strategies.

Bioscience reports. 2020 Aug 13 [Epub ahead of print]

Zihao He, Tuo Deng, Xiaolu Duan, Guohua Zeng

The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, China.