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Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 20|pp 9025—9042

Differentially expressed autophagy-related genes are potential prognostic and diagnostic biomarkers in clear-cell renal cell carcinoma

Bangbei Wan1, Bo Liu2, Gang Yu1, Yuan Huang3, Cai Lv1
  • 1Department of Urology, Central South University Xiangya School of Medicine Affiliated Haikou Hospital, Haikou 570208, Hainan, China
  • 2Laboratory of Developmental Cell Biology and Disease, School of Ophthalmology and Optometry and Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325003, China
  • 3Department of Neurology, Central South University Xiangya School of Medicine Affiliated Haikou Hospital, Haikou 570208, Hainan, China
Received: August 16, 2019Accepted: October 7, 2019Published: October 17, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102368

Copyright © 2019 Wan et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

We examined the role of differentially expressed autophagy-related genes (DEARGs) in clear cell Renal Cell Carcinoma (ccRCC) using high-throughput RNA-seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Cox regression analyses showed that 5 DEARGs (PRKCQ, BID, BAG1, BIRC5, and ATG16L2) correlated with overall survival (OS) and 4 DEARGs (EIF4EBP1, BAG1, ATG9B, and BIRC5) correlated with disease-free survival (DFS) in ccRCC patients. Multivariate Cox regression analysis using the OS and DFS prognostic risk models showed that expression of the nine DEARGs accurately and independently predicted the risk of disease recurrence or progression in ccRCC patients (area under curve or AUC values > 0.70; all p < 0.05). Moreover, the DEARGs accurately distinguished healthy individuals from ccRCC patients based on receiver operated characteristic (ROC) analyses (area under curve or AUC values > 0.60), suggesting their potential as diagnostic biomarkers for ccRCC. The expression of DEARGs also correlated with the drug sensitivity of ccRCC cell lines. The ccRCC cell lines were significantly sensitive to Sepantronium bromide, a drug that targets BIRC5. This makes BIRC5 a potential therapeutic target for ccRCC. Our study thus demonstrates that DEARGs are potential diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets in ccRCC.