PCaDB - a comprehensive and interactive database for transcriptomes from prostate cancer population cohorts

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a heterogeneous disease with highly variable clinical outcomes which presents enormous challenges in the clinical management. A vast amount of transcriptomics data from large PCa cohorts have been generated, providing extraordinary opportunities for the comprehensive molecular characterization of the PCa disease and development of prognostic signatures to accurately predict the risk of PCa recurrence. The lack of an inclusive collection and standard processing of the public transcriptomics datasets constrains the extensive use of the valuable resources. In this study, we present a user-friendly database, PCaDB, for a comprehensive and interactive analysis and visualization of gene expression profiles from 50 public transcriptomics datasets with 7,231 samples. PCaDB also includes a single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNAseq) dataset for normal human prostates and 30 published PCa prognostic signatures. The advanced analytical methods equipped in PCaDB would greatly facilitate data mining to understand the heterogeneity of PCa and to develop prognostic signatures and machine learning models for PCa prognosis. PCaDB is publicly available at http://bioinfo.jialab-ucr.org/PCaDB/.