A seven-Lnc RNA signature for prognosis prediction of patients with lung squamous cell carcinoma through tumor immune escape

Abstract

Abstract Lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) is a malignant disease with poor therapeutic response and a poor prognosis. Some basic researches had confirmed that dysregulation of long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) was associated with cancer development and prognosis. However, related studies in LUSC are rare. In this paper, we purposed to develop a group LncRNAs signature to improve prognosis prediction of LUSC and describe the underlying mechanism. The LncRNAs expression and related clinical information of 471 patients with LUSC from TCGA randomly divided into a training set (n = 236) and a testing set (n = 235). A seven-LncRNAs prognostic signature model were constructed with the data of training group by multivariate Cox regression. All patients were divided into high risk group (n = 101) and low risk group (n = 370) according to the risk-score level calculated by the constructed model at the cutoff value of -0.12 (log2-transformed). The high risk group had a significantly worse overall survival (OS) compared to the low risk group (p < 0.0001). The risk-score also displayed an excellent prognostic predictive ability for LUAC patients by the results of ROC curve (AUC:0.66, 0.67 and 0.67) and nomogram (C-index, Calibration analysis, and Decision Curve Analysis) in years 1, 3, and 5. The risk group [HR = 0.3, 95%CI (0.22–0.4)], stage [HR = 1.78, 95%CI (1.28–2.48)] and age [HR = 1.02, 95%CI (1.00-1.04)] were as an independent predictor among LUAC patients. KEEG enrichment revealed that the mRNA influenced by the hunted seven LncRNAs which involved in immune escape function may be mainly related to the pathway of Chemical carcinogenesis, Th17 cell differentiation, NF − κB and Proteoglycans in cancer, etc. And the CIBERSORT score calculated from the expression level of the immune cell rerated gene between the normal cell and LUSC cell were showed that the immune system in the LUSC patients was activated. To sum up, our study demonstrated the potential clinical significance of 7-LncRNA characteristics in the prediction of survival in patients with LUSC.