Identification of a seven-miRNA signature as prognostic biomarker for lung squamous cell carcinoma

BACKGROUND: Specific biomarkers for outcome prediction of lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) are still lacking. This study assessed the prognostic value of differentially expressed miRNAs of LUSC patients. RESULTS: Twelve of the 133 most significantly altered miRNAs were associated with overall survival (OS) across different clinical subclasses of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) LUSC cohort. A linear prognostic model of seven miRNAs was developed to divide patients into high- and low-risk groups. Patients assigned to the high-risk group exhibited poor OS compared with patients in the low-risk group, which was further validated in the validation cohort and entire LUSC cohort. METHODS: MiRNA expression profiles with clinical information of 447 LUSC patients were obtained from TCGA. Most significantly altered miRNAs were identified between tumor and normal samples. Using survival analysis and supervised principal components method, a seven-miRNA signature for prediction of OS of LUSC patients was established. Survival receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was used to assess the performance of survival prediction. The biological relevance of predicted miRNA targets was also analyzed using bioinformatics method. CONCLUSIONS: The current study suggests that seven-miRNA signature may have clinical implications in the outcome prediction of LUSC.