A potential prognostic lncRNA signature for predicting survival in patients with bladder urothelial carcinoma

Abstract

// Zhenyu Bao 1, * , Weitao Zhang 2, * , Dong Dong 1 1 Shanghai Key Laboratory of Regulatory Biology, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China 2 Urology Surgery Department, Affiliated Hospital of Taishan Medical University, Shandong, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Dong Dong, email: ddong.ecnu@gmail.com Keywords: long non-coding RNA, prognosis, bladder urothelial carcinoma Received: October 15, 2016     Accepted: December 08, 2016     Published: January 02, 2017 ABSTRACT Increasing evidence has highlighted the critical roles of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) in cancer development and progression. However, the prognostic power of expression-based lncRNA signature for predicting overall survival in patients with Bladder Urothelial Carcinoma (BLCA) has not been investigated. Here, we performed a comprehensive analysis for lncRNA expression profiles and corresponding clinical information of 234 BLCA patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We established a set of four-lncRNAs that were significantly associated with BLCA patients’ survival. Using the prognostic four-lncRNA signature, we successfully classified the BLCA patients into high-risk and low-risk groups, and the prognostic power of the four-lncRNA signature was further validated in the testing dataset and entire dataset. Multivariate Cox regression and stratified analyses demonstrated that the prognostic power of the four-lncRNA signature was independent of other clinical variables. Functional enrichment analyses suggested the four prognostic lncRNAs may be involved in known BLCA-related biological processes and pathways. Our results demonstrated that the four-lncRNA signature could be novel independent biomarkers for predicting survival in patients with BLCA.