A novel seven-long non-coding RNA signature predicts survival in early stage lung adenocarcinoma

// Mingwei Chen 1 , Baoquan Liu 1 , Jianbing Xiao 1 , Yingnan Yang 2 , Yafang Zhang 1 1 Department of Anatomy, Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150081, PR China 2 Department of Thoracic Surgery, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150040, PR China Correspondence to: Yafang Zhang, email: yafangzhang2008@aliyun.com Yingnan Yang, email: yangyingnanltx@163.com Keywords: long non-coding RNAs, lung adenocarcinoma, survival, prognosis Received: November 16, 2016      Accepted: January 11, 2017      Published: January 21, 2017 ABSTRACT Increasing evidence has revealed the significant association between dysregulated lncRNA expression and cancers. The prognostic value of lncRNAs in predicting the risk of disease recurrence and identifying high-risk subgroup of early stage lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is still unclear. In this study, we analyzed lncRNA expression profiles of 415 early-stage LUAD patients from Gene Expression Omnibus and identified a novel seven-lncRNA signature that was significantly associated with survival in patients with early-stage LUAD (HR = 2.718, CI = 2.054–3.597, p < 0.001). Based on the seven-lncRNA signature, we constructed a risk score model which is able to classify patients of training dataset into the high-risk group and the low-risk group with significantly different clinical outcome ( p < 0.001). The robustness of the seven-lncRNA signature was successfully validated through application in other two independent patient datasets. Furthermore, the prognostic value of seven-lncRNA signature was independent of other clinicopathological factors including age, gender, stage and smoking status. Functional analysis suggested that the seven-lncRNA signature may be involved in a variety of biological pathways including cell cycle, ECM-receptor interaction, Focal adhesion and p53 signaling pathway. Taken together, our study not only provides insights into the lncRNA association with LUAD, but also provide alternative molecular markers in prognosis prediction for early-stage LUAD patients.