lncRNAs AC156455.1 and AC104532.2 as Biomarkers for Diagnosis and Prognosis in Colorectal Cancer

BACKGROUND: There have been countless studies to date assessing specific oncogenic pathways in a range of tumor classes, but the role of N6-methyladenosine- (m6A-) related long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) in colorectal cancer (CRC) remains to be defined. METHODS: We analyzed such m6A-related lncRNAs by conducting analyses of the Pearson correlation with information originating from the databank of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The prognostic relevance of these lncRNAs in CRC was then assessed through a series of univariate Cox regression analyses, leading to the identification of two different m6A modification patterns; they are associated with clinical outcomes and have been used to estimate tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) by the CIBERSORT and ESTIMATE algorithms. We tested the expression of m6A-related lncRNAs in twelve pairs of colorectal cancer tissues and adjacent normal tissues from patients by qRT-PCR. RESULTS: We discovered the prognostic risk signature composed of six m6A-related lncRNAs based upon TCGA data. When the overall survival of cases in the dataset of TCGA was investigated, the low-risk cases survived longer than the high-risk CRC cases in both the training and testing cohorts. ROC curves further indicated that m6A-related lncRNA prognostic signature (m6A-LPS) can effectively estimate the survival outcomes of patients in both of these cohorts. We found that lncRNAs AC156455.1 and AC104532.2 were upregulated in twelve colorectal cancer tissues compared with adjacent normal tissues using qRT-PCR. CONCLUSIONS: This data highlights that the lncRNAs AC156455.1 and AC104532.2 in CRC can be used as biomarkers for diagnostics and prognosis in CRC, demonstrating their potential as targets when designing novel immunotherapeutic regimens.