Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 14|pp 14582—14592

Construction of a prognosis-predicting model based on autophagy-related genes for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients

Yayun Zhu¹, Ru Wang^2,³, Wanbin Chen⁴, Qiuyu Chen⁵, Jian Zhou^6,^7,^8,⁹

¹Department of Liver Surgery and Transplantation, Liver Cancer Institute, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
²Institute for Cell Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
³Department of Breast Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China
⁴Department of Marketing, The Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, Baltimore, MD 21202, USA
⁵Department of Clinical Immunology, Children’s Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai, China
⁶Department of Liver Surgery and Transplantation, Liver Cancer Institute and State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
⁷Key Laboratory of Carcinogenesis and Cancer Invasion, Fudan University, Ministry of Education, Shanghai, China
⁸Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
⁹Shanghai Key Laboratory of Organ Transplantation, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

* Equal contribution

Received: March 9, 2020Accepted: June 4, 2020Published: July 18, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Zhu 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

Background: Autophagy, a highly conserved cellular catabolic process by which the eukaryotic cells deliver autophagosomes engulfing cellular proteins and organelles to lysosomes for degradation, is critical for maintaining cellular homeostasis in response to various signals and nutrient stresses. The dysregulation of autophagy has been noted in the pathogenesis of cancers. Our study aims to investigate the prognosis-predicting value of autophagy-related genes (ARG) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

Results: The signature was constructed based on eight ARGs, which stratified HCC patients into high- and low-risk groups in terms of overall survival (OS) (Hazard Ratio, HR=4.641, 95% Confidential Interval, CI, 3.365-5.917, P=0.000). The ARG signature is an independent prognostic indicator for HCC patients (HR = 1.286, 95% CI, 1.194-1.385; P < 0.001). The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) for 5-year survival is 0.765.

Conclusion: This study provides a potential prognostic signature for predicting the prognosis of HCC patients and molecular insights into the significance of autophagy in HCC.

Methods: Sixty-two differentially expressed ARGs and the clinical characteristics and basic information of the 369 enrolled HCC patients were retrieved from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. the Cox proportional hazard regression analysis was adopted to identify survival-related ARGs, based on which a prognosis predicting signature was constructed.