A four-lncRNA signature for predicting prognosis of recurrence patients with gastric cancer

PURPOSE: This study aimed to develop a multi-long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) signature for the prediction of gastric cancer (GC) based on differential gene expression between recurrence and nonrecurrence patients. METHODS: By repurposing microarray expression profiles of RNAs from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), we performed differential expression analysis between recurrence and nonrecurrence patients. A prognostic risk prediction model was constructed based on data from TCGA database, and its reliability was validated using data from Gene Expression Omnibus database. Furthermore, the lncRNA-associated competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network was constructed, namely, DIANA-LncBasev2 and starBase database. RESULTS: We identified 363 differentially expressed RNAs (317 mRNAs, 18 lncRNAs, and 28 microRNAs [miRNAs]). Principal component analysis showed that the seven-feature lncRNAs screened by support vector machine–recursive feature elimination algorithm was more informative for predicting recurrence of GC in comparison with the eight-feature lncRNAs screened by random forest–out-of-bag algorithm. Four of the seven-feature lncRNAs including LINC00843, SNHG3, C21orf62-AS1, and MIR99AHG were chosen to develop a four-lncRNA risk score model. This risk score model was able to distinguish patients with high and low risk of recurrence, and was tested in two independent validation sets. The ceRNA network of this four-lncRNA signature included 10 miRNAs and 178 mRNAs. The mRNAs significantly related to the Wnt-signaling pathway and relevant biological processes. CONCLUSION: A useful four-lncRNA signature recurrence was established to distinguish GC patients with high and low risk of recurrence. Regulating the relevant miRNAs and Wnt pathway might partly affect GC metastasisby.