Identification of the Ferroptosis-Associated Gene Signature to Predict the Prognostic Status of Endometrial Carcinoma Patients

Endometrial carcinoma (EC) is one of the most common gynecological carcinomas. As previously described, ferroptosis was reported to exhibit a significant association with the development of malignant neoplasms. Nevertheless, there are few studies towards the association between the implication of ferroptosis-related genes (FRGs) and the prognostic status of patients with EC. Our study demonstrated that ferroptosis-related genes were evidently differently expressed in EC. Further analysis showed that SLC7A11, SAT1, CDKN1A, and TP5MC3 expression was linked to the low stage, grade of pTNM, and longer survival time. Bioinformatics analysis demonstrated that these ferroptosis-related regulators played a crucial role in EC by modulating multiple biological processes, such as cell cycle, citrate cycle (TCA cycle), metabolism-related pathways, ERK activation, p53 signaling pathway, cellular senescence, TAp63 pathway, and Notch signaling pathway. Of note, our results showed that ATP5MC3, CDKN1A, and SLC7A11 expression was dramatically positively related with the tumor mutational burden (TMB) score in EC. However, we did not observe a significant correlation between SAT1 and the TMB score in EC. These findings for the first time demonstrated that ferroptosis was displayed crucially in EC progression. We speculated that our findings offered novel targets and strategies for personalized treatment.