Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 22|pp 23306—23325

Identification of immune-related LncRNA for predicting prognosis and immunotherapeutic response in bladder cancer

Yucai Wu^1,^2,^3,⁴, Lei Zhang^1,^2,^3,⁴, Shiming He^1,^2,^3,⁴, Bao Guan^1,^2,^3,⁴, Anbang He^1,^2,^3,⁴, Kunlin Yang^1,^2,^3,⁴, Yanqing Gong^1,^2,^3,⁴, Xuesong Li^1,^2,^3,⁴, Liqun Zhou^1,^2,^3,⁴

¹Department of Urology, Peking University First Hospital, Beijing, China
²Institute of Urology, Peking University, Beijing, China
³National Urological Cancer Center, Beijing, China
⁴Urogenital Diseases (Male) Molecular Diagnosis and Treatment Center, Peking University, Beijing, China

* Equal contribution

Received: June 29, 2020Accepted: September 9, 2020Published: November 18, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104115

Copyright: © 2020 Wu 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

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have multiple functions in the cancer immunity response and the tumor microenvironment. To investigate the immune-related lncRNA (IRlncRNA) signature for predicting prognosis and immunotherapeutic response in bladder cancer (BLCA), we extracted BLCA data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Finally, a total of 405 cases were enrolled and 8 prognostic IRlncRNAs (MIR181A2HG, AC114730.3, LINC00892, PTPRD-AS1, LINC01013, MRPL23-AS1, LINC01395, AC002454.1) were identified in the training set. Risk scores were calculated to divide patients into high-risk and low-risk groups, and the high-risk patients tended to have a poor overall survival (OS). Multivariate Cox regression analysis confirmed that the IRlncRNA signature could be an independent prognostic factor. The results were subsequently confirmed in the validating set. Additionally, this 8-IRlncRNA classifier was related to recurrence free survival (RFS) of BLCA. Functional characterization revealed this signature mediated immune-related phenotype. This signature was also associated with immune cell infiltration (i.e., macrophages M0, M2, Tregs, CD8 T cells, and neutrophils) and immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) immunotherapy-related biomarkers [mismatch repair (MMR) genes, tumor mutation burden (TMB) and immune checkpoint genes]. The present study highlighted the value of the 8-IRlncRNA signature as a predictor of prognosis and immunotherapeutic response in BLCA.