A newly identified pyroptosis-related gene signature for predicting prognosis of patients with hepatocellular cancer

BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a very heterogeneous illness, making prognosis prediction a huge problem. Pyroptosis, which has recently been shown to be an inflammatory type of programmed cell death, is involved in HCC. Nevertheless, the role of pyroptosis-related genes in HCC has not been fully elucidated. Thus, this study aimed to construct a prognostic signature based on pyroptosis-related genes for HCC. METHODS: The messenger RNA expression patterns of HCC patients, as well as the accompanying clinical information, were retrieved from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database for this research. After differentially expressed pyroptosis-related Gene in tumor and normal groups were identified, Cox regression analyses were performed to construct a prognostic signature which was then assessed through independent prognostic analysis. RESULTS: A signature consisting of four genes (CASP8, GSDME, NOD2, and PLCG1) was constructed to predict overall survival (OS) for HCC. The signature was identified to be independent by the cox regression analysis and obtained the largest area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) was 0.691, 0.628, and 0.632 for survival at 1, 2, and 3 years, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: We discovered that the levels of pyroptosis-related genes expression differed across HCC patients and were associated with both survival and prognosis. This suggested that targeting pyroptosis as a treatment strategy for HCC may be a viable option.