Development and clinical validation of a novel six-gene signature for accurately predicting the recurrence risk of patients with stage II/III colorectal cancer

BACKGROUND: A large number of patients with stage II/III colorectal cancer (CRC) have a high recurrence rate after radical resection. We aimed to develop a novel tool to stratify patients with different recurrence-risk for optimizing decision-making in post-operative surveillance and therapeutic regimens. METHODS: We retrospectively enrolled four independent cohorts from the Gene Expression Omnibus and 66 CRC tissues from our hospital. The initial signature discovery was conducted in GSE143985 (n = 91). This was followed by independent validation of this signature in GSE17536 (n = 111), GSE29621 (n = 40), and GSE92921 (n = 59). Further experimental validation using qRT-PCR assays (n = 66) was performed to ensure the robustness and clinical feasible of this signature. RESULTS: We developed a novel recurrence-related signature consisting of six genes. This signature was validated to be significantly associated with dismal recurrence-free survival in five cohorts GSE143985 (HR: 4.296 [2.612–7.065], P < 0.0001), GSE17536 (HR: 2.354 [1.662–3.334], P < 0.0001), GSE29621 (HR: 3.934 [1.622–9.539], P = 0.0024), GSE92921 (HR: 7.080 [2.011–24.924], P = 0.0023), and qPCR assays (HR: 3.654 [2.217–6.020], P < 0.0001). This signature was also proven to be an independent recurrent factor. More importantly, this signature displayed excellent discrimination and calibration in predicting the recurrence-risk at 1–5 years, with most AUCs were above 0.9, average C-index for the five cohorts was 0.8795, and near-perfect calibration. CONCLUSIONS: We discovered and experimental validated a novel gene signature with stable and powerful performance for identifying patients at high recurrence-risk in stage II/III CRC. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12935-021-02070-z.