Identification of iron metabolism-related genes as prognostic indicators for papillary thyroid carcinoma: a retrospective study

BACKGROUND: The thyroid cancer subtype that occurs more frequently is papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). Despite a good surgical outcome, treatment with traditional antitumor therapy does not offer ideal results for patients with radioiodine resistance, recurrence, and metastasis. The evidence for the connection between iron metabolism imbalance and cancer development and oncogenesis is growing. Nevertheless, the iron metabolism impact on PTC prognosis is still indefinite. METHODS: Herein, we acquired the medical data and gene expression of individuals with PTC from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. Typically, three predictive iron metabolism-related genes (IMRGs) were examined and employed to build a risk score (RS) model via the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression, univariate Cox, and differential gene expression analyses. Then we analyzed somatic mutation and immune cell infiltration among RS groups. We also validated the prognostic value of two IMRGs (SFXN3 and TFR2) by verifying their biological function through in vitro experiments. RESULTS: Based on RS, all patients with PTC were stratified into low- and high-risk groups, where Kaplan-Meier analysis indicated that disease-free survival (DFS) in the high-risk group was much lower than in the low-risk group (P < 0.0001). According to ROC analysis, the RS model successfully predicted the 1-, 3-, and 5-year DFS of individuals with PTC. Additionally, in the TCGA cohort, a nomogram model with RS was developed and exhibited a strong capability to anticipate PTC patients’ DFS. In the high-risk group, the enriched pathological processes and signaling mechanisms were detected utilizing the gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA). Moreover, the high-risk group had a significantly higher level of BRAF mutation frequency, tumor mutation burden, and immune cell infiltration than the low-risk group. In vitro experiments found that silencing SFXN3 or TFR2 significantly reduced cell viability. CONCLUSION: Collectively, our predictive model depended on IMRGs in PTC, which could be potentially utilized to predict the PTC patients’ prognosis, schedule follow-up plans, and provide potential targets against PTC.