Open Medicine (Mar 2023)

A novel autophagy-related long non-coding RNAs signature predicting progression-free interval and I-131 therapy benefits in papillary thyroid carcinoma

  • Hao Jie,
  • Wang Shoujun,
  • Wang Jinmiao,
  • Zhang Zhendong,
  • Gao Ming,
  • Wan Yajuan

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/med-2023-0660
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18, no. 1
pp. 7 – 33

Abstract

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This study aimed to explore the prognostic and predictive value of autophagy-related lncRNAs in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). The expression data of autophagy-related genes and lncRNAs of the PTC patients were obtained from TCGA database. Autophagy-related-differentially expressed lncRNAs (DElncs) were identified and used to establish the lncRNAs signature predicting patients’ progression-free interval (PFI) in the training cohort. Its performance was assessed in the training cohort, validation cohort, and entire cohort. Effects of the signature on I-131 therapy were also explored. We identified 199 autophagy-related-DElncs and constructed a novel six-lncRNAs signature was constructed based on these lncRNAs. This signature had a good predictive performance and was superior to TNM stages and previous clinical risk scores. I-131 therapy was found to be associated with favorable prognosis in patients with high-risk scores but not those with low-risk scores. Gene set enrichment analysis suggested that a series of hallmark gene sets were enriched in the high-risk subgroup. Single-cell RNA sequencing analysis suggested that the lncRNAs were mainly expressed in thyroid cells but not stromal cells. In conclusion, our study constructed a well-performed six-lncRNAs signature to predict PFI and I-131 therapy benefits in PTC.

Keywords