scholarly journals A novel five-zinc finger-related-gene signature related to tumor immune microenvironment allows for treatment stratification and predicts prognosis in clear cell renal cell carcinoma patients

Author(s):  
Feilong Zhang ◽  
Jiyue Wu ◽  
Jiandong Zhang ◽  
Peng Cao ◽  
Zejia Sun ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is one of the most prevalent renal malignant tumors, which survival rate and quality of life of ccRCC patients are not satisfactory. Therefore, identification of prognostic biomarkers of ccRCC patients will contribute to early and accurate clinical intervention and treatment, and then improve their prognosis. Methods We downloaded the original expression data of mRNAs from The Cancer Genome Atlas database and the zinc finger(ZNF)-related genes (ZRGs) from UniProt online database. Differentially expressed ZRGs (DE-ZRGs) was screened from tumor and adjacent nontumor tissues and functional enrichment analysis was conducted out. A five-ZRG signature were constructed by univariate Cox regression, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and multivariate Cox regression. Furthermore, we screened out independent prognosis-related factors to build a nomogram by univariate and multivariate Cox regression. Potential biological pathways of five ZRGs were analyzed by Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA). Then, we further quantitatively analyze immune infiltration and evaluate tumor microenvironment by single sample GSEA. Finally, drug sensitivity of ccRCC patients was analyzed by the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer database. Results TRIM59, VAV3, ZNF189, AGAP9 and PYGO1 were screened to be significantly associated with the prognosis of ccRCC patients. Through incorporated risk score and clinical parameters, we constructed a nomogram, which showed a good prognostic performance for ccRCC patients.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianming Ma ◽  
Xiaonan Wang ◽  
Jiawen Wang ◽  
Xiaodong Liu ◽  
Shicong Lai ◽  
...  

Increasing evidence suggests that N6-methyladenosine (m6A) and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play important roles in cancer progression and immunotherapeutic efficacy in clear-cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). In this study, we conducted a comprehensive ccRCC RNA-seq analysis using The Cancer Genome Atlas data to establish an m6A-related lncRNA prognostic signature (m6A-RLPS) for ccRCC. Forty-four prognostic m6A-related lncRNAs (m6A-RLs) were screened using Pearson correlation analysis (|R| > 0.7, p < 0.001) and univariable Cox regression analysis (p < 0.01). Using consensus clustering, the patients were divided into two clusters with different overall survival (OS) rates and immune status according to the differential expression of the lncRNAs. Gene set enrichment analysis corroborated that the clusters were enriched in immune-related activities. Twelve prognostic m6A-RLs were selected and used to construct the m6A-RLPS through least absolute shrinkage and selection operator Cox regression. We validated the differential expression of the 12 lncRNAs between tumor and non-cancerous samples, and the expression levels of four m6A-RLs were further validated using Gene Expression Omnibus data and Lnc2Cancer 3.0 database. The m6A-RLPS was verified to be an independent and robust predictor of ccRCC prognosis using univariable and multivariable Cox regression analyses. A nomogram based on age, tumor grade, clinical stage, and m6A-RLPS was generated and showed high accuracy and reliability at predicting the OS of patients with ccRCC. The prognostic signature was found to be strongly correlated to tumor-infiltrating immune cells and immune checkpoint expression. In conclusion, we established a novel m6A-RLPS with a favorable prognostic value for patients with ccRCC. The 12 m6A-RLs included in the signature may provide new insights into the tumorigenesis and allow the prediction of the treatment response of ccRCC.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shouyong Liu ◽  
Yi Wang ◽  
Chenkui Miao ◽  
Qianwei Xing ◽  
Zengjun Wang

Abstract BackgroundCell division cycle-associated 7 (CDCA7), as a member of the cell division cycle associated family, was reported to be aberrantly expressed in both solid tumors and hematological tumors, suggesting its essential role in promoting tumorigenesis. Hence, we aimed to explore its comprehensive role of overall survival (OS) in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) and emphasis on immunity.MethodsThe RNA sequencing data and corresponding clinical information were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was adopted to explore CDCA7 associated signaling pathways. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were carried out to assess independent prognostic factors. Furthermore, roles of CDCA7 in human immunity were also investigated.ResultsOur results suggested that CDCA7 was overexpressed in ccRCC and its elevated expression was related to shorter OS (P<0.01). Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses identified CDCA7 as an independent prognostic factor (both P<0.05). The prognostic nomogram integrating CDCA7 expression level and clinicopathologic variables was constructed to predict 1-, 3- and 5-year OS. GSEA indicated that high CDCA7 expression was related to the apoptosis pathway, cell cycle pathway, JAK-STAT pathway, NOD like receptor pathway, P53 pathway, T cell receptor pathway and toll like receptor pathway, etc. As for immunity, CDCA7 was significantly associated with tumor mutational burden (TMB), immune checkpoint molecules, tumor microenvironment and immune infiltration.ConclusionsCDCA7 could serve as an independent prognostic factor for ccRCC and it was closely related to immunity


2016 ◽  
Vol 311 (2) ◽  
pp. F424-F436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed I. Khan ◽  
Konrad J. Dębski ◽  
Michał Dabrowski ◽  
Anna M. Czarnecka ◽  
Cezary Szczylik

In recent years, genome-wide RNA expression analysis has become a routine tool that offers a great opportunity to study and understand the key role of genes that contribute to carcinogenesis. Various microarray platforms and statistical approaches can be used to identify genes that might serve as prognostic biomarkers and be developed as antitumor therapies in the future. Metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) is a serious, life-threatening disease, and there are few treatment options for patients. In this study, we performed one-color microarray gene expression (4×44K) analysis of the mRCC cell line Caki-1 and the healthy kidney cell line ASE-5063. A total of 1,921 genes were differentially expressed in the Caki-1 cell line (1,023 upregulated and 898 downregulated). Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) and Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) approaches were used to analyze the differential-expression data. The objective of this research was to identify complex biological changes that occur during metastatic development using Caki-1 as a model mRCC cell line. Our data suggest that there are multiple deregulated pathways associated with metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma (mccRCC), including integrin-linked kinase (ILK) signaling, leukocyte extravasation signaling, IGF-I signaling, CXCR4 signaling, and phosphoinositol 3-kinase/AKT/mammalian target of rapamycin signaling. The IPA upstream analysis predicted top transcriptional regulators that are either activated or inhibited, such as estrogen receptors, TP53, KDM5B, SPDEF, and CDKN1A. The GSEA approach was used to further confirm enriched pathway data following IPA.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hua-Hui Wu ◽  
Xin Yan ◽  
Zhao Chen ◽  
Guo-Wei Du ◽  
Xiao-Jie Bai ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) occupied most of renal cell carcinoma (RCC), which associated with poor prognosis. The purpose of this study is to screen novel and prognostic biomarkers for patients with ccRCC. Methods and results Firstly, Gene Expression Omnibus database was used to collect microarray data for weighted gene co-expression network construction. Gene modules related to prognosis which interest us most were picked out. 90 hub genes were further chosen in the key modules, two of which including gonadotropin releasing hormone 1 (GNRH1) and leukotriene B4 receptor (LTB4R) were screened and validated as immune-related prognostic biomarkers. Based on several public databases and ccRCC tissues collected by ourselves, we performed survival analysis, spearman correlation analysis, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR), western blotting, immunofluorescence (IF) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining for the validation of immune-related prognostic biomarkers. We further explored the relationship between immune-related prognostic biomarker expressions and immunocytes. Finally, gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) demonstrated that the two immune-related prognostic biomarkers were significantly correlated with cell cycle. Conclusions Generally speaking, the present study has identified two novel prognostic biomarkers for patients with ccRCC, which showed strong correlation with prognosis of patients with ccRCC, could further be used as potential prognostic biomarkers in ccRCC.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuquan Xiong ◽  
Hongjie Yu ◽  
Yan Ding ◽  
Chenchen Feng ◽  
Hanming Wei ◽  
...  

In the past few years, therapies targeted at the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) and hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) pathways, such as sunitinib and sorafenib, have been developed to treat clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). However, the majority of patients will eventually show resistance to antiangiogenesis therapies. The purpose of our study was to identify novel pathways that could be potentially used as targets for new therapies. Whole transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) was conducted on eight matched tumor and adjacent normal tissue samples. A novel RUNX1-RUNX1T1 pathway was identified which was upregulated in ccRCC through gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA). We also confirmed the findings based on previously published gene expression microarray data. Our data shows that upregulated of the RUNX1-RUNX1T1 gene set maybe an important factor contributing to the etiology of ccRCC.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huaru Zhang ◽  
Xiaofu Qiu ◽  
Guosheng Yang

The cysteine-serine-rich nuclear protein (CSRNP) family has prognostic value for various cancers. However, the association between this proteins and prognosis of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) remains unclear. This study aimed to determine the prognostic value of the CSRNP family for patients with ccRCC. Therefore, the gene expression profiling interactive analysis database was used to analyze the mRNA expression of CSRNP family members (CSRNPs) in relation with survival. Combined and independent prognostic values of CSRNPs were evaluated using SurvExpress and multivariate Cox regression analyses, respectively. Potential signaling pathways impacted by CSRNPs were evaluated using Metascape. Associations between the CSRNP family and immunocyte infiltration were determined from single-sample gene set enrichment analysis. Both cBioPortal and MethSurv were used to explore whether genomic and epidemic alterations might influence prognosis. We found that when both CSRNP1 and CSRNP3 had a low expression, patients with ccRCC had a worse overall survival (OS). Therefore, a prognostic signature was constructed as follows: risk score = −0.224 × expmRNA ofCSRNP1 + 0.820 × expmRNA ofCSRNP2 − 1.428 × expmRNA ofCSRNP3. We found that OS was worse in patients from the high- than from the low-risk groups (AUC = 0.69). Moreover, this signature was an independent predictor after adjusting for clinical features. Functional enrichment analysis positively associated CSRNPs with the acute inflammatory response and humoral immune response pathways. This was validated by correlating each CSRNP with 28 types of immunocytes in tumor and normal tissues. A higher expression of CSRNP1 and CSRNP3 was associated with a better prognosis in both the high- and low-mutant burden groups. Cg19538674, cg07772537, and cg07811002 of CSRNP1, CSRNP2, and CSRNP3, respectively, were the predominant DNA methylation sites affecting OS. The CSRNP gene family signature may serve as a prognostic biomarker for predicting OS in patients with ccRCC. The association between CSRNPs and immune infiltration might offer future clinical treatment options.


2022 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Zhang ◽  
Xiyi Wei ◽  
Yichun Wang ◽  
Shuai Wang ◽  
Chengjian Ji ◽  
...  

BackgroundIt is well known that chronic inflammation can promote the occurrence and progression of cancer. As a type of proinflammatory death, pyroptosis can recast a suitable microenvironment to promote tumor growth. However, the potential role of pyroptosis in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) remains unclear.MethodsThe transcriptome expression profile and mutation profile data of ccRCC with clinical characteristics included in this study were obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases. Consensus clustering was used for clustering. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) analysis were applied to evaluate the biological mechanisms. Single sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA) was applied for evaluating the proportion of various immune infiltrating cells. The ESTIMATE algorithm was involved to compute the immune microenvironment scores.ResultsAmong the 17 pyroptosis regulators, a total of 15 pyroptosis regulators were differential expressed between tumor and normal tissues, in which 12 of them emerged strong correlations with prognoses. According to the pyroptosis components, the ccRCC patients were divided into four pyroptosis subtypes with different clinical, molecular, and pathway characteristics. Compared with other clusters, cluster B showed the pyroptosis heat phenotype, while cluster D represented the pyroptosis cold phenotype with poor overall survival. In addition, we performed principal component analysis (PCA) on the differential genes between clusters to construct the pyroptosis index. Furthermore, the pyroptosis index was significantly correlated with survival in different tumor mutation statuses and different grades and stages. Besides, the expression of pyroptosis-related regulators was related to the infiltration of immune cells and the expression of immune checkpoints, among which AIM2 was considered as the most significant immune-related pyroptosis regulator. Ultimately, we found that AIM2 was related to the immune activation pathway and was significantly overexpressed in tumor tissues.ConclusionThis study revealed that pyroptosis regulators and pyroptosis index played an important role in the development and prognoses of ccRCC. Moreover, AIM2 can be used as a predictor of the response of immunotherapy. Assessing the pyroptosis patterns may help evaluate the tumor status and guide immunotherapy strategies.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingwei Ke ◽  
Jie Chen ◽  
Xin Liu

Abstract Background: There is still controversy regarding immunotherapy biomarkers. Therefore, we aimed to identify prognostic biomarkers related to immunotherapy for clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC).Methods: Fragments Per Kilobase Million (FPKM) data and clinical characteristics for ccRCC patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database were downloaded. Unsupervised consensus clustering analysis was performed to divide patients into different immune subgroups according to their single-sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA) scores. Then, we validated the differences in immune cell infiltration, prognosis, clinical characteristics and expression levels of HLA and immune checkpoint genes between different immune subgroups. Weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA) was used to identify the significant modules and hub genes that were related to the immune subgroups. A nomogram was established to predict the overall survival (OS) outcomes after independent prognostic factors were identified by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression and multivariate Cox regression analyses.Results: Five clusters (immune subgroups) were identified. There was no significant difference in age, sex or N stage. And there were significant differences in race, T stage, M stage, grade, prognosis and tumor microenvironment. HLA gene families and CTLA4 showed significant differences between the five clusters, while PD1 and PDL1 did not. The red module was significant, and 14 hub genes were obtained. In addition, the nomogram containing LAG3 and GZMK accurately predicted OS outcomes of ccRCC patients.Conclusion: LAG3 and GZMK are strongly related to immunity and may provide suggestions for ccRCC immunotherapy.


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