Scientific Reports (May 2022)
Immunoprognostic model of lung adenocarcinoma and screening of sensitive drugs
Abstract
Abstract Screening of mRNAs and lncRNAs associated with prognosis and immunity of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and used to construct a prognostic risk scoring model (PRS-model) for LUAD. To analyze the differences in tumor immune microenvironment between distinct risk groups of LUAD based on the model classification. The CMap database was also used to screen potential therapeutic compounds for LUAD based on the differential genes between distinct risk groups. he data from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. We divided the transcriptome data into a mRNA subset and a lncRNA subset, and use multiple methods to extract mRNAs and lncRNAs associated with immunity and prognosis. We further integrated the mRNA and lncRNA subsets and the corresponding clinical information, randomly divided them into training and test set according to the ratio of 5:5. Then, we performed the Cox risk proportional analysis and cross-validation on the training set to construct a LUAD risk scoring model. Based on the risk scoring model, patients were divided into distinct risk group. Moreover, we evaluate the prognostic performance of the model from the aspects of Area Under Curve (AUC) analysis, survival difference analysis, and independent prognostic analysis. We analyzed the differences in the expression of immune cells between the distinct risk groups, and also discuss the connection between immune cells and patient survival. Finally, we screened the potential therapeutic compounds of LUAD in the Connectivity Map (CMap) database based on differential gene expression profiles, and verified the compound activity by cytostatic assays. We extracted 26 mRNAs and 74 lncRNAs related to prognosis and immunity by using different screening methods. Two mRNAs (i.e., KLRC3 and RAET1E) and two lncRNAs (i.e., AL590226.1 and LINC00941) and their risk coefficients were finally used to construct the PRS-model. The risk score positions of the training and test set were 1.01056590 and 1.00925190, respectively. The expression of mRNAs involved in model construction differed significantly between the distinct risk population. The one-year ROC areas on the training and test sets were 0.735 and 0.681. There was a significant difference in the survival rate of the two groups of patients. The PRS-model had independent predictive capabilities in both training and test sets. Among them, in the group with low expression of M1 macrophages and resting NK cells, LUAD patients survived longer. In contrast, the monocyte expression up-regulated group survived longer. In the CMap drug screening, three LUAD therapeutic compounds, such as resveratrol, methotrexate, and phenoxybenzamine, scored the highest. In addition, these compounds had significant inhibitory effects on the LUAD A549 cell lines. The LUAD risk score model constructed using the expression of KLRC3, RAET1E, AL590226.1, LINC00941 and their risk coefficients had a good independent prognostic power. The optimal LUAD therapeutic compounds screened in the CMap database: resveratrol, methotrexate and phenoxybenzamine, all showed significant inhibitory effects on LUAD A549 cell lines.